Above all, you hope, now that he knows the truth and his curiosity is satisfied, he will loathe all filthy jests and stories about that which is the source of all beautiful living things on the pleasant earth and, in his own little world, of all happy family life and innocent home love and joy.
Let me quote here, in conclusion, a little poem, called "The Golden Ladder," which seems to me to embody some of the teaching of this exquisite page of the illuminated Word of Creation, which man has so blotted and defiled with his obscenities, but which to "open hearts and love-lit eyes" is the spring of all that is highest--the birth of the moral and the cradle of the divine.
"When torn with Passion's insecure delights, By Love's dear torments, ceaseless changes worn, As my swift sphere full twenty days and nights Did make, ere one slow morn and eve were born; "I passed within the dim, sweet world of flowers, Where only harmless lights, not hearts, are broken, And weep out the sweet-watered summer showers-- World of white joys, cool dews, and peace unspoken; "I started, even there among the flowers, To find the tokens mute of what I fled-- Passions, and forces, and resistless powers, That have uptorn the world and stirred the dead.
"In secret bowers of amethyst and rose, Close wrapped in fragrant golden curtains laid, Where silver lattices to morn unclose, The fairy lover clasps his flower-maid.
"Ye blessed children of the jocund day! What mean these mysteries of love and birth?
Caught up like solemn words by babes at play, Who know not what they babble in their mirth.
"Or of one stuff has some Hand made us all, Baptized us all in one great sequent plan, Where deep to ever vaster deep may call, And all their large expression find in Man?
"Flowers climb to birds, and birds and beasts to Man, And Man to God, by some strong instinct driven; And so the golden ladder upward ran, Its foot among the flowers, its top in heaven.
"All lives Man lives; of matter first then tends To plants, an animal next unconscious, dim, A man, a spirit last, the cycle ends,-- Thus all creation weds with God in him.
"And if he fall, a world in him doth fall, All things decline to lower uses; while The golden chain that bound the each to all Falls broken in the dust, a linkless pile.
"And Love's fair sacraments and mystic rite In Nature, which their consummation find, In wedded hearts, and union infinite With the Divine, of married mind with mind, Foul symbols of an idol temple grow, And sun-white Love is blackened into lust, And man's impure doth into flower-cups flow, And the fair Kosmos mourneth in the dust.
O Thou, out-topping all we know or think, Far off yet nigh, out-reaching all we see, Hold Thou my hand, that so the top-most link Of the great chain may hold, from us to Thee; "And from my heaven-touched life may downward flow Prophetic promise of a grace to be; And flower, and bird, and beast, may upward grow, And find their highest linked to God in me." Possibly you will say at once, "Oh, my boy has no taste for natural history, and he would take no interest in this kind of thing." All the better his finding it a bit dry--it will rid the subject of some of its dangerous attraction.

I have yet to find the boy for whom the Latin Grammar has the least interest; but we do not excuse him on that ground from grinding at it.

Whether he takes an interest in it or not, you have to teach him that he has got to know about these things before going to school, to guard him from the danger of having all sorts of false, and often foul, notions palmed off on him.

I do not say that pure knowledge will necessarily save, but I do say that the pitcher which is full of clear spring-water has no room for foul.

I do say that you have gained a great step, if in answer to the offer of enlightenment which he is certain to receive, you have enabled your boy to acquit himself of the rough objurgation--forgive me for putting it in schoolboy language: "Oh, hold your jaw! I know all about that, and I don't want any of your rot." I do say that early associations are most terribly strong, and if you will secure that those early associations with regard to life and birth shall be bound up with all the sanctities of life--with home, with his mother, with family, with all that is best and highest in life; then his whole attitude in life will be different.