the
swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and touch and hear
through a sort of golden mist. Children, for instance, are able enough
to see, but they have no great faculty for looking; they do not use
their eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their own;
and the things I call to mind seeing most vividly were not beautiful in
themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I thought they
might be turned to practical account in play. Nor is the sense of touch
so clean and poignant in children as it is in a man. If you will turn
over your old memories, I think the sensations of this sort you remember
will be somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt, general
sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of well-being in
bed. And here, of course, you will understand pleasurable sensations;
for overmastering pain--the most deadly and tragical element in life,
and the true commander of man's soul and body--alas! pain has its own
way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden
where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than it rules upon
the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering to his
father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us from this
sting. As for taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated
sugar which delight a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical
asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth. Smell and
hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many scents, many voices,
and a great deal of spring singing in the woods. But hearing is capable
of vast improvement as a means of pleasure; and there is all the world
between gaping wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with
which a man listens to articulate music.

At the same time, and step by step with this increase in the definition
and intensity of what we feel which accompanies our growing age, another
change takes place in the sphere of intellect, by which all things are
transformed and seen through theories and associations as through
coloured windows. We make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and
gossip, and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in
which we walk and through which we look abroad. We study shop windows
with other eyes than in our childhood, never to wonder, not always to
admire, but to make and modify our little incongruous theories about
life. I