nd new circumlocutions to a
language.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a
moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every
day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many
sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social
relations 'breaking the ice.' If this were expanded into a sonnet, we
should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of
everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature,
over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the
living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a
kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white
elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away
with them--a whole chaos of fairy tales.

* * * * *

A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP

The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are,
first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in
consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is
possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools
and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of
a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the
universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a
transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this:
that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put
again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those
delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark
these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within
every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on
the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system
of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.

There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion
teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand
the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we
have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the
stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is
the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and
which will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies
and aspirati