*
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 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.
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