And then, too, the sorrow and suffering of the world came home in dim glimpses to the child, as a thing which was inextricably intertwined with the life of men and animals alike. There was as yet no attempt to harmonise the two dominant strains of feeling; they were the two great facts for him—beauty and sorrow; they seemed so distinct from, so averse to each other, sorrow laying her pale hand so firmly on life, withering it at its very source, and striking from it what was lovely and delectable. And yet he noted the pathetic attempt of beauty to reassert itself, as in the violets which grew on the child’s grave, and drew their sweetness from sad mortality. And there came too the terror of death, the sad incidents of which imprint themselves with so sinister a horror on the tender mind. “At any time or place, in a moment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathed around him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the bright carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest communing with himself.” These were the dreams of childhood, the unchecked visions of the sheltered and secluded home; at Canterbury came a wider, nobler, richer prospect of beauty. He found himself in that exquisite, irregular city, with its narrow streets; the mouldering gateways leading to the Close, where the huge Cathedral rises among a paradise of lawns and gardens; with the ancient clustering houses, of which some contain the gables and windows of the old monastic buildings, while some are mere centos of ancient stone, the ruins having been used for a quarry; some of mellow brick, with a comfortable Erastian air about them, speaking of the settled prosperity of eighteenth-century churchmanship; the whole tenderly harmonised by sun and rain into a picture of equable, dignified English life, so that wherever the eye turned, it fell upon some delicate vignette full of grace and colour. It is of this period that _Emerald Uthwart_, that strange fanciful story, holds certain reminiscences, but reminiscences coloured and tranquillised by the backward-looking eye. “If at home there had been nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought stone; the daring height, the daring severity, of the innumerable, long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at last, in due place, into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic arch; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come from further than the light outside.”