us appearances are no longer
detached and changeless to him; they are alive, and they change moment
by moment. Ah, the young feet have come now to the very threshold of
the temple, and fortunate are they if there be one to guide them whose
heart still speaks the language of childhood while her thought rests in
the great truths which come with deep and earnest living. Childhood is
defrauded of half its inheritance when no one swings wide before it the
door into the fairyland of Nature; a land in which the most beautiful
dreams are like visions of the distant Alps, cloud-like, apparently
evanescent, yet eternally true; in which the commonest realities are
more wonderful than visions. How many children live all their
childhood in the very heart of this realm, and are never so much as
told to look about them. The sublime miracle play is yearly performed
in their sight, and they only hear it said that it is hot or cold, that
the day is fair or dark!

And now there come sudden insights into still larger and more awful
truths; a sense of wonder and awe makes the night solemn with mystery.
Who does not recall some starlit night which suddenly, alone on a
country road, perhaps, seemed to flash its splendour into his very soul
and lift all life for a moment to a sublime height? The trees stood
silent down the long road, no other footstep echoed far or near, one
was alone with Nature and at one with her; suspecting no strange
nearness of her presence, no sudden revelation of her inner self, and
yet in the very mood in which these were both possible and natural.
The boy of Wordsworth's imagination would stand beneath the trees "when
the earliest stars began to move along the edges of the hills," and,
with fingers interwoven, blow mimic hootings to the owls:

And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call--with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud,
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mock'd his skill,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

It is in such