Indeed, for the moment he was a child again, and there is nothing in after-life like the pure imaginings of such. To the child every incident is a picture framed and hung upon a wall. The memory of these pictures abides long, then fades a little and a little more. We are hardly conscious of them in old age, or at least feel hardly the ecstasy of their atmosphere. In acquiring our identities (Keats’s phrase), what don’t we lose? We find a fact for a dream--a wretched exchange. But the first possession doesn’t altogether go. It recurs to us at odd moments in little sweet mental vertigoes--never so much, perhaps, as during that half-waking hour of dawn when we are least conscious of our material selves. Then to think of a dewy morning down; of a pleached alley of fruit-trees in blossom; of a windy common; of the mystery of snow and brooding distances; of a Christmas-tree, even, and the mingled ravishing smell of lighted tapers and banked fir-branches, is momentarily to recall the amazing romance and illimitableness of life; is to be quit of the dreariness of conviction, and to stand once more at the foot of the green slope, and look up and wonder whither the clouds are sailing over the far summit. A few artists, a few writers, a few musicians, have the power, or the instinct, to inspire us with these ancient imaginings; and such as can, we must dearly love, though they may never stand in the front ranks of their fellows. The child is the only real genius; and perhaps these have remained morally children. In mid-life they can arrest and record the fugitive retrospections that to the most of us are only bubbles broken away from the far-distant spring of life, to be caught at and to vanish on the prick of possession. God bless them! they are our best earnest of the spiritual. Out of his luminous stupor on that grassy borderland of dawn, the dreamer came with a full heart, and, it must be confessed, a biting consciousness of emptiness in his stomach. He sprang out of bed, and bathed and dressed to the hissing accompaniment of ostlers in the yard below and to the clank of horse-hoofs on the cobble-stones. He breakfasted, as men did in those days, as if he were victualling for a siege, and had great thoughts of kissing the chambermaid when he fee’d her--but refrained. By half-past nine he was on the road, with a heart full of gaiety, and a recurring wonder for his destination, and clattered under the old west gateway of the town with a song on his lips-- She was throated like the stare-- Well-a-day! She was white as buds of May-- Well-a-day! And all with their sweet scent Her bodie was besprent, That to kiss her was a joy beyond compare, If her mouth the scarlet hips-- Well-a-day! Would for redness all dismay-- Well-a-day! Ah! it took its comely stain From the truths that she had slain; For falser than the serpent were her lips.