pleasure I have never since
forgot, and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall; for it was
then I knew I loved reading.

*****

The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter that
was read to me, and not of any manner in the words. If these pleased me,
it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great vacant world
upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots that I might
re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances that I might
call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland, and
home, and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in which I lay so long
in durance.

*****

I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black belt of the
garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there a
lighted window. How often before had my nurse lifted me out of bed and
pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if, there also, there
were children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were
signs of those that waited like us for the morning.

*****

There never was a child but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a
military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and
suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore,
and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected
innocence and beauty.

*****

None more than children are concerned for beauty, and, above all, for
beauty in the old.

*****

So in youth, like Moses from the mountain, we have sights of that
House Beautiful of art which we shall never enter. They are dreams
and unsubstantial; visions of style that repose upon no base of human
meaning; the last heart-throb of that excited amateur who has to die in
all of us before the artist can be born. But they come in such a rainbow
of glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in
comparison. We are all artists; almost all in the age of illusion,
cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some
deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of
whatever nature, is a kind of mistress; and though these dreams of
youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, grave and more
substantial; the symptoms change, the amiable malady endures; and still
at an equal distance, the House Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.

*****

Children, for instance, are able enough to see, but they have no great
facul