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. The child is conscious
of an interest, not in literature but in life.
A taste for the precise, the adroit, or the comely
in the use of words, comes late; but long before that
he has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal
of experience. He is first conscious of this
material—I had almost said this practical—pre-occupation;
it does not follow that it really came the first.
I have some old fogged negatives in my collection
that would seem to imply a prior stage ’The
Lord is gone up with a shout, and God with the sound
of a trumpet’—memorial version, I
know not where to find the text—rings still
in my ear from my first childhood, and perhaps with
something of my nurses accent. There was possibly
some sort of image written in my mind by these loud
words, but I believe the words themselves were what
I cherished. I had about the same time, and
under the same influence—that of my dear
nurse—a favourite author: it is possible
the reader has not heard of him—the Rev.
Robert Murray M’Cheyne. My nurse and I
admired his name exceedingly, so that I must have
been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was
breeched; and I remember two specimens of his muse
until this day:-
’Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown.’
There is imagery here, and I set it on one side.
The other—it is but a verse—not
only contains no image, but is quite unintelligible
even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know
not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed
me in my childhood:
‘Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her’;
{6} —
I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing
to me either, since I had no ray of a guess of what
he was about; yet the verse, from then to now, a longer
interval than the life of a generation, has continued
to haunt me.
I have said that I should set a passage distinguished
by obvious and pleasing imagery, however faint; for
the child thinks much in images, words are very live
to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond
their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes
of memory, I came once upon a graphic version of the
famous Psalm, ‘The Lord is my shepherd’:
and from the places employed in its illustration,
which are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a
house then occupied by my father, I am able, to date
it before the seventh year of my age, although it
