The intellect wakes earlier than the feelings, curiosity before the passions. The child asks the scientist’s Why? before he asks the poet’s How? George read little primers on Botany and Geology and the Story of the Stars, and collected butterflies, and wanted to do chemistry, and hated Greek. And then one evening the world changed. It was at Martin’s Point. All one night the South-West wind had streamed over the empty downs, sweeping up in a crescendo of sound to a shrill ecstasy of speed, sinking into abrupt sobs of dying vigour, while underneath steadily, unyieldingly, streamed and roared the major volume of the storm. The windows rattled. Rain pelted on the panes, oozed and bubbled through the joints of the woodwork. The sea, dimly visible at dusk, rolled furiously-tossing long breakers on the rocks, and made a tumult of white horses in the Channel. Even the largest ships took shelter. In the irregular harmony of that storm George went to sleep in his narrow lonely child’s bed, and who knows what Genius, what Puck, what elfin spirit of Beauty came riding on the storm from the South, and shed the juice of what magic herb on his closed eyes? All next day the gale blew with ever diminishing violence. It was a half holiday, and no games on account of the wet. After lunch, George went to his room, and sank absorbed in his books, his butterflies, his moths, his fossils. He was aroused by a sudden glare of yellow sunlight. The storm had blown itself out. The last clouds, broken in lurid ragged-edged fragments, were sailing gently over a soft blue sky. Soon even they were gone. George opened the window, and leaned out. The heavy dank smell of wet earth-mould came up to him with its stifling hyacinth-like quality; the rain-drenched privet was almost over-sweet; the young poplar leaves twinkled and trembled in the last gusts, shaking down rapid chains of diamonds. But it was all fresh, fresh with the clarity of air which follows a great gale, with the scentless purity of young leaves, the drenched grasses of the empty downs. The sun moved majestically and imperceptibly downwards in a widening pool of gold, which faded, as the great ball vanished, into pure clear hard green and blue. One, two, a dozen blackbirds and linnets and thrushes were singing; and as the light faded they dwindled to one blackbird tune of exquisite melancholy and purity. Beauty is in us, not outside us. We recognize our own beauty in the patterns of the infinite flux. Light, form, movement, glitter, scent, sound, suddenly apprehended as givers of delight, as interpreters of the inner vitality, not as the customary aspect of things. A boy, caught for the first time in a kind of ecstasy, brooding on the mystery of beauty. A penetrating voice came up the stairs: “Georgie! Georgie! Come out of that stuffy room at once! I want you to get me something from Gilpin’s.”