much as even heard of "the Blue Bird"!

If these uncomfortably "childlike" people read Dickens, they would
know how a child really does regard life, and perhaps they would be
a little shocked. For it is by no means only the "romantic" and
"aesthetic" side of things that appeals to children. They have their
nightmares, poor imps, and such devils follow them as older people
never dream of. Dickens knew all that, and in his books the thrill of
the supernatural, as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots and
pans, is never far away. It lurks, that repelling-alluring Terror, in a
thousand simple places. It moves in the darkness of very modern
cupboards. It hides in the recesses of very modern cellars. It pounces
out from the eaves of quite modern attics. It is there, halfway up the
Staircase. It is there, halfway down the Passage. And God knows
whither it comes or where it goes!

To endow the little every-day objects that surround us--a certain
picture in a certain light, a certain clock or stove in a certain shadow,
a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it--with the
fetish-magic of natural "animism"; that is the real childlike trick, and
that is what Dickens does. It is, of course, something not confined to
people who are children in years. It is the old, sweet Witch-Hag,
Mystery, that, sooner or later, has us all by the throat!

And that is why, to me, Dickens is so great a writer. Since men have
come to live so much in cities; since houses and streets and rooms
and passages and windows and basements have come to mean more
to them than fields and woods, it is essential that "the Old Man
covered with a Mantle," the Ancient of Ancients, the Disturber of
Rational Dreams, should move into the town, too, and mutter and
murmur in its shadows!

How hard a thing is it, to put into words the strange attraction and
the strange terror which the dwellings of mortal men have the power
of exciting! To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wander
through its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, empty
churches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by its
Prison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in some
tall house--the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer--surely
there is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the things
one sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors and
shutter-chinks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of men