Despite the stilted style and absurdly pompous descriptions, with an occasional terrible breakdown, Charlie's love of Nature, and especially of the animal creation, seems to have been most genuine. He speaks of "the wide ocean which when angry roars and clashes over the beach, but when calm crabs are seen crawling on the shore and the sun shines bright over the waves," and of "the billows rolling over each other and foaming over the rough stones," with an apparently real enthusiasm. The softer emotions of his nature were engrossed in this way, as we infer from the negative evidence afforded by his autobiography that he reached his seventh year without any experience of the tender passion. His physiological ideas in the speculations regarding the origin of a baby-brother are naively expressed: "One day I was told that a baby was born [this was when he was three years and a half old], and upon going into mamma's bedroom I saw a red baby lying in an arm-chair wrapped in swaddling-clothes. It puzzled me very much to think how he came into the world: it was mysterious, very, and I cannot make it out now. My first thought was, that he must have had airy wings, and after he had come they had disappeared. My second thought was that he was so very little as to be able to come through the keyhole, and increased rapidly in size, just as it says in the Bible that a grain of mustard-seed springs to be so large a tree that the fowls of the air can roost upon it." In his sixth year Charlie evinced poetic tendencies. We have in one of his poems a description of his grandpapa, "a venerable old gentleman with dark eyes, gray hair, noble features, and altogether very generous aspect." Here is "a song appropriate to him:" Oh, venerable is our old ancestor-- Cloud on his brow, Lightning in his eyes, His gray hair streaming in the wind. To children ever kind, To merit never blind,-- Oh, such is our old ancestor, With hair that streameth wild. At the head of this poem is a picture of the old ancestor, consisting of a hat, a head, a walking-stick, one arm and two legs, one of which--whether the right or left is doubtful, as their origin is concealed by the aforesaid arm--is much longer than the other, and walking in a contrary direction. The most wonderful feature of this sketch is the "hair streaming in the wind," the distance from the poll to the end of the flowing locks being longer than the longest leg.