We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,--if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass--the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows--the same redbreasts that we used to call "God's birds," because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and _loved_ because it is known? The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers, and the blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground-ivy at my feet--what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows--such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us, and transform our perception into love. [Footnote: Chapter V.] In the backward glance of _Theophrastus Such_ this anchorage of the life in familiar associations is described as a source of our faith in the spiritual, even when all the childhood thoughts about those associations cannot be retained. The illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions. They feed the ideal better, and in loving them still, we strengthen, the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of our visible, tangible selves.