*
What shall we be when we grow really old? Of yore, a man
was thought to lay on restrictions and acquire new
deadweight of mournful experience with every year, till
he looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse
and freedom.
*
And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled
away in their season, and that all clouds roll away at
last, and the troubles of youth in particular are things
but of a moment.
*
Through what little channels, by what hints and
premonitions, the consciousness of the man's art dawns
first upon the child, it should be not only interesting but
instructive to inquire. A matter of curiosity to-day, it
will become the ground of science to-morrow. From the mind
of childhood there is more history and more philosophy to
be fished up than from all the printed volumes in a
library.
*
I could not finish THE PIRATE when I was a child, I have
never finished it yet; PEVERIL OF THE PEAK dropped half way
through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have since
waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the
exercise was quite without enjoyment. There is something
disquieting in the considerations. I still think the visit
to Ponto's the best part of the BOOK OF SNOBS: does that
mean that I was right when I was a child, or does it mean
that I have never grown since then, that the child is not
the man's father, but the man? and that I came into the
world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned
sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom?
*
The child thinks much in images, words are very live
to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond
their value.
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