beyond the horizon line and left me under a spell so deep that I have hardly yet shaken it off and turned to other sights and thoughts. One of the great concerns of life is this silent, unbroken procession of the seasons, rising from the deeps of time like dreams sent to touch our mortal life with more than mortal beauty. Stars, tides, flowers, foliage, birds, clouds, snows, and storms how marvellous is the frame in which they appear and disappear about us; as real as ourselves, and yet as fleeting and elusive as our dreams!

Rosalind and I have often talked about these things as they appear to children, and we are agreed that nature is a good deal nearer and more intelligible to childhood than most people think. Children of sensitive and imaginative temper have marvellous capacity for receiving impressions they absorb as unconsciously to themselves as to others. When they seem most indifferent or preoccupied, they are often most impressionable. Unperceived by those who are nearest them, unrecognised at the moment by themselves, there often press upon the mind of a child the

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deepest and most awful mysteries of life; mysteries that lie far below the plummet of thought. It is only as one thinks back and recalls out of memory those marvellous moments when every visible thing seemed suddenly smitten with unreality in the presence of some great spiritual truth, felt but uncomprehended, that one realises the depth and richness of the unspoken thoughts of children. In a passage of great beauty De Quincey has described the feelings that came when as a boy he stood beside the form of his dead sister. "There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face; and, as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that not one feature had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead, indeed the serene and noble forehead that might be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating the supplications of closing anguish could these be mistaken for life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly lips with tears and never ending

kisses? But so it was not. I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn Memnonian but saintly swell; it is in this world the one great audible symbol of eternity." That wind, more real than any that ever blew over earthly fields, was heard by no one but the imaginative child standing, to all appearance, silent and spellbound beside his sister's form.

Not long ago Rosalind was looking through Goethe's "Autobiography" to recall what the German boy of six years thought of the terrible earthquake at Lisbon in 1755, when she happened upon another very interesting and significant passage in child life. The boy Goethe had heard much of the discussion about religious matters which was warm in those days, and invaded even the quiet and

somewhat dry atmosphere of his father's house. He gave no sign, but these things sank into his heart, and finally there came to him the great thought that he too might personally approach the invisible God of nature. "The God who stands in immediate connection with nature, and owns and loves it as his work, seemed to him. the proper God, who might be brought into closer relationship with man, as with everything else, and who would take care of him as of the motion of the stars, the days and seasons, the animals and plants. The boy could ascribe no form to this Being; he therefore sought him in his works, and would, in the good Old Testament fashion, build him an altar." accomplish this deep and secret purpose he took a lacquered music-stand and ornamented it according to his own idea of symbolism. This done, and the fumigating pastils arranged, the young priest awaited the rising of the sun. When the red light lay bright along the edges of the roofs, he held a burning-glass above the pastils, ignited them, and so obtained both the flame and the fragrance necessary

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