Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A great, and exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early, instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand in hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I cannot tell now—it was so; and if this sympathy with the external, living, beautiful world, had been properly, scientifically cultivated, and directed to useful definite purposes, it would have been the best remedy for much that was morbid: this was not the case, and we were, unhappily for me, too early removed from the country to a town residence. I can remember, however, that in very early years the appearances of nature did truly “haunt me like a passion;” the stars were to me as the gates of heaven; the rolling of the wave to the shore, the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they grew by the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects; the trembling shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon; these were to me perfect pleasures of which the imagery now in my mind is distinct. Wordsworth’s poem of “The Daffodils,” the one beginning— “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a vivid truth, a simple fact; and if Wordsworth had been then in my hands I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of beauty which gave the first zest to poetry: I love it, not because it told me what I did not know, but because it helped me to words in which to clothe my own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back the pictures unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what made Thomson’s “Seasons” a favourite book when I first began to read for my own amusement, and before I could understand one half of it; St. Pierre’s “Indian Cottage” (“La Chaumière Indienne”) was also charming, either because it reflected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in pictures of an external world quite different from that I inhabited,—palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with flowing draperies; and the “Arabian Nights” completed my Oriental intoxication, which lasted for a long time.