Thus Mr. Knowlton went on, year after year, speaking poetry without knowing it, as Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain found he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it.  But the conception of the sun as God’s flat-iron, smoothing out and warming the moist earth, as a housewife smooths and warms the yet damp shirts, stockings, and bed-linen brought into the house from the clothes-lines in the yard, is an astounding illustration of that “familiar grasp of things divine,” which obtains in so many of our rustic households.  Dante or Chaucer, two of the greatest poets of the world, would, had they happened to be “uneducated” men, have seized on just such an image to express their idea of the Divine beneficence.

This natural, this instinctive operation of the imaginative faculty, is often observed in children.  Numberless are the stories told by fond mothers of the wonderful things uttered by their babies, shortly after they have left their cradles.  The most striking peculiarity running through them all is the astonishing audacity with which the child treats the most sacred things.  He or she seems to have no sense of awe.  All children are taught to believe that God resides above them in the sky; and I shall never forget the shock of surprise I felt at the answer of a boy of five years—­whom I found glorying over the treasures of his first paint-box—­to my question:  “Which color do you like best?” “Oh,” he carelessly replied, “I like best sky-blue,—­God’s color.”  And the little rogue went on, daubing the paper before him with a mixture of all colors, utterly unconscious that he had said any thing remarkable; and yet what Mrs. Browning specially distinguishes as the characteristic of the first and one of the greatest of English poets, Chaucer, namely, his “familiar grasp of things Divine,” could not have found a more appropriate illustration than in this chance remark of a mere child, expressing the fearlessness of his faith in the Almighty Father above him.

Now in all these instinctive operations of the imagination, whether in the mind of a child or in that of a grown man, it is easy to discern the mark of sincerity.  If the child is petted, and urged by his mother to display his brightness before a company of other mothers and other babies, he is in danger of learning early that trick of falsehood, which clings to him when he goes to school, when he leaves the school for the college, and when he leaves the college for the pursuits of professional life.  The farmer or mechanic, not endowed with “college larnin’,” is sure to become a bad declaimer, perhaps a demagogue, when he abandons those natural illustrations and ornaments of his speech which spring from his individual experience, and strives to emulate the grandiloquence of those graduates of colleges who have the heathen mythology at the ends of their fingers and tongues, and can refer to Jove, Juno, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Vulcan, and Neptune, as though they were resident deities and