“What (writes a German author already quoted) all childish fancy has almost without exception in common, is the idea of a wholly new and unheard-of world behind the remote horizon, behind woods, lakes and hills, and all objects reached by the eye. When I was a child and we played hide and seek in the barn, I always felt that there must or might be behind every bundle of straw, and especially in the corners, something unheard of lying hidden. And yet I had no profane curiosity, no desire to experiment by turning over the bundle of straw. It was just a fancy, and though I half recognised it as such it was lively enough to engage me as a reality.” The same writer goes on to describe how his imagination ever occupied itself with what lay behind the long stretch of wood which closed in a large part of his child’s horizon.[35] ----- Footnote 35: Goltz, _Das Buch der Kindheit_, p. 276. ----- This imaginative filling up of the remote and the hidden recesses of the outer world is subject to manifold stimulating influences from the region of feeling. We know that all vivid imagination is charged with emotion, and this is emphatically true of children’s phantasies. The unseen, the hidden, contains unknown possibilities, something awful, terrible, it may be, to make the timid wee thing shudder in anticipatory vision, or wondrously and surprisingly beautiful. How far the childish attitude is from intellectual curiosity is seen in the remark of Goltz, that no impious attempt is made to probe the mystery. The other way in which this happy fusion of fancy with incomplete perception may be effected is through the working of the impulse to give outward embodiment to vivid and persistent images. All play, as we have seen, is an illustration of the impulse, and certain kinds of play show the working of the impulse in its purity. It extends, however, beyond the limits of what is commonly known as play. The instance quoted above, the peopling of a certain wood with wolves by the child C., was of course due in part to the fact that the small impressionable brain was at this time much occupied with the idea of the wolf. Dickens and others have told us how when children they were wont to project into the real world the lively images acquired from storyland. When suitable objects present themselves the images are naturally enough linked on to these. Thus Dickens writes: “Every burn in the neighbourhood, every stone of the church, every foot of the churchyard had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books (_Roderic Random_, _Tom Jones_, _Gil Blas_, etc.), and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Piper go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself on the wicket-gate.”[36] ----- Footnote 36: Quoted by Forster, _Life of Charles Dickens_, chap. i. -----