Perhaps the nearest approach to a pure æsthetic enjoyment in these early days is the love of flowers. The wee round wonders with their mystery of velvety colour are well fitted to take captive the young eye. I believe most children who live among flowers and have access to them acquire something of this sentiment, a sentiment in which admiration for beautiful things combines with a kind of dumb childish sympathy. No doubt there are marked differences among children here. There are some who care only, or mainly, for their scent, and the keen sensibilities of the olfactory organ appear to have a good deal to do with early preferences and prejudices in the matter of flowers. Others again care for them mainly as a means of personal adornment, though I am disposed to think that this partially interested fondness is less common with children than with many adults. In much of this first crude utterance of the æsthetic sense of the child we have points of contact with the manifestations of taste among uncivilised races. Admiration for brilliant colours, for moving things, such as feathers, is common to the two. Yet a child coming under the humanising influences of culture soon gets far away from the level of the savage. Perhaps his almost perfectly spontaneous love of tiny flowers is already a considerable advance on his so-called prototype. Many adults assume that a child can look at a landscape as they look at it, taking in the whole picturesque effect. When he is taken to Switzerland and shown a fine "view," his eye, so far from seizing the whole, will provokingly pounce on some unimportant detail of the scene and give undivided attention to this, That the eye of a child of ten or less can enjoy the reddening of a snow-peak, or the emergence of a bright green alp from the mountain mist, I fully believe. But it is quite another thing to expect him to appreciate great extent of view and all the unnameable relations of form, of light and shade, and of colour, which compose a landscape. _First Peep into the Art-world._ While Nature is thus speaking to a child through her light, her colour and her various forms, human art makes appeal also. In a cultured home a child finds himself at the precincts of the art-temple, and feels there are wondrous delights within if he can only get there. One of the earliest of these appeals is to the ear. A child outside the temple of art hears its music before he sees its veiled beauties. I have had occasion to show how sadly new sounds may perturb the spirit of an infant. Yet these same waves of sound, which break upon and shake the young nerves, give them, too, their most delightful thrill. Nowhere in adult experience do pleasure and sadness lie so near one another as in music, and a child's contrasting responses, as he now shrinks away with trouble in his eyes, now gratefully reaches forth and falls into joyous sympathetic movement, are a striking illustration of this proximity.