Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A six year darling of a pigmy size! See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses, With light upon him from his father’s eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art; A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral; And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song. With these mental possessions he is opening his mind to the coming conquests of life: as much to be conquered by its beauty as to conquer it. But what he gains from his appreciation of earth’s loveliness brings loss to none; in this extension of his mental horizon there is no shutting of others from a like view; this aspect of the dominion upon which he is now entering is communal, something illimitable, which all may share. Of possession acquired upon those terms we need never be afraid. And it is a very real possession, far more real, as I shall hope presently to show, than any mere power to thwart, hinder, or control the freedom of others, which is the form of possession at which too often man aims. Let us start, in order to realise this, with certain other experiments of childhood. Which child more truly “possesses” the life of linnet or hedge-sparrow, making it in some measure his own: the child who stays quiet and disciplines himself to watch the bird at the building of its nest, the hatching of its eggs and the feeding of its young; or the child who puts an end to all that beauty and complexity of motion by bringing down his bird with a stone? If he comes to tell others of his experience, what alternatively is there for him to tell? In the one case only his own act of destruction, a thing done and brought to a dead end; in the other he has a dozen new things to tell of--discoveries made in a process of life which he has watched with delight and knows still to be going on. From which of these two experiments does he draw the larger consciousness? Which of the two most peoples his world for him? Step by step as he advances he will find how much, by interfering with the lives of others, he can destroy, but how little he can build up; he can take hold of the daddy-legs leg by leg and find that they all come off, and wonder perhaps at the zest with which that eager little martyr fulfils the words of Scripture, “If thy foot offend thee cut it off and cast it from thee.” But constant repetition of the experiment, though it may give him an evil sense of power, will give him no variety, no real advance in knowledge concerning the life, or the use and beauty of flies’ legs. He will not treasure--to benefit by them--the legs that he has pulled off, nor will his brain have stored anything but an added sense of and liking for his own power to destroy. And so will it be with everything on which he experiments destructively.