The Child is Father to the Man
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety. (William Wordsworth, 1802)
How a boy's heart leaps in childhood, it shall also leap in adulthood.
From his childhood the boy learns how to navigate life, its pleasures and its pains, its hopes and its heartaches. Such mapping of his soul becomes his unwitting life pattern continued through his adult years, with all its attendant virtues and vices. The boy's characteristics travel with him into adulthood.
It is the boy within that shapes the man without.
Let a man's boyish heart always leap for his rainbows in the sky, but let his adult head first discern the true and right rainbows still wise to leap for.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. (1 Corinthians 13:11)
Today's Soul Snippet:
"When compassion arises rash judgement dies."
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