But the force is not there; the muscle is weak; the nerve paralyzed; and
we die at twenty of a light fever, we fall down at twenty, under sudden
grief or temptation, because of our long sleeps under soothing syrups when
we were babies.
Oh, good nurses and doctors of souls, let them cut their own teeth, in the
natural ways. Let them scream if they must, but keep you still on one
side; give them no false helps; let them alone so far as it is possible
for love and sympathy to do so. Man is the only animal that has trouble
from the growing of the teeth in his body. It must be his own fault
somehow that he has that; and he has evidently been always conscious of a
likeness between this difficulty and perversion of a process natural to
his body, and the difficulty and perversion of his getting sensible and
just opinions; for it has passed into the immortality of a proverb that a
shrewd man is a man who has "cut his eye-teeth;" and the four last teeth,
which we get late in life, and which cost many people days of real
illness, are called in all tongues, all countries, "wisdom teeth!"
Glass Houses.
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