and when we might have
acted differently; to see and to say what has really mattered, what has
made a deep mark on our spirit; what has hampered or wounded or maimed
us. Because one of the strangest things about life seems to be our
incapacity to decide beforehand, or even at the time, where the real
and fruitful joys, and where the dark dangers and distresses lie. The
things that at certain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope and
aim, seemed so infinitely desirable, so necessary to happiness, have
faded, many of them, into the lightest and most worthless of husks and
phantoms, like the withered flowers that we find sometimes shut in the
pages of our old books, and cannot even remember of what glowing and
emotional moment they were the record!

How impossible it is ever to learn anything by being told it! How
necessary it is to pay the full price for any knowledge worth having!
The anxious father, the tearful mother, may warn the little boy before
he goes to school of the dangers that await him. He does not
understand, he does not attend, he is looking at the pattern of the
carpet, and wondering for the hundredth time whether the oddly-shaped
blue thing which appears and reappears at intervals is a bird or a
flower--yes, it is certainly meant for a bird perched on a bough! He
wishes the talk were over, he looks at the little scar on his father's
hand, and remembers that he has been told that he cut it in a
cucumber-frame when he was a boy. And then, long afterwards perhaps,
when he has made a mistake and is suffering for it, he sees that it was
THAT of which they spoke, and wonders that they could not have
explained it better.

And this is so all along! We cannot recognise the dark tower, to which
in the story Childe Roland came, by any description. We must go there
ourselves; and not till we feel the teeth of the trap biting into us,
do we see that it was exactly in such a place that we had been warned
that it would be laid.

There is an episode in that strange and beautiful book Phantastes, by
George Macdonald, which comes often to my mind. The boy is wandering in
the enchanted forest, and he is told to avoid the house where the
Daughter of the Ogre lives. His morose young guide shows him where the
paths divide, and he takes the one indicated to him with a sense of
misgiving.

A little while before he had been deceived by the Alder-maiden, and had
given her his love in error. This has taken some of the old