_The Child in the House_ is the sweetest and tenderest of all Pater’s fancies, the work, we may say, where his art approached most nearly to a kind of music. We have before indicated the autobiographical vein of the piece, but it remains to say something of the art of the essay, which is conceived in a certain golden mood of retrospect, and makes an appeal to all who, however rarely, indulge a train of gentle recollection. Such a mood is wrought in us by a sort of sudden charm; the sight of old places where we have lived untroubled days brings it back with a wistful swiftness, so that we feel a yearning desire, it may be, for our own unstained past; we contrast what we are and what we have become, with what we were and with what we might have been. This mood, a sort of “death in life” as Tennyson says, may surprise natures overlaid with conventionalism and even coarseness. It is one of the commonest and most forcible, because truest, effects of pathos, in books that aim at dramatic effect, when the crust of later careless habit suddenly breaks, and the old clear stream of life seems to be running there below all the while. Such an experience may hold within it, even for the most worldly and hardened minds, a hope of immortality, a hope of redemption. That strange and yearning hunger of the heart for a purity, a simplicity, which it once had, before the bitter root of evil sent up its poisonous flowers into the soul, is one of the most primal emotions of nature. It is in such a mood that a man is apt to feel most self-forgiving, most self-pitying, because he feels that it is circumstance and seduction of sense that have marred a nature that in itself desired purity and simplicity. It is not perhaps the highest of emotions, because it is a mood in which life would seem to hold no lessons but the lesson of inevitable decline, ungenerous deterioration; but there is no denying its strength, its sad charm. In _The Child in the House_ we see a boy deeply sensitive to beautiful impressions, to all the quiet joys, the little details of home: its carved balusters and shadowy angles, its scents and sounds, its effects of light and shade, and further abroad, the trees of the garden, the hawthorn bush, with its “bleached and twisted trunk and branches” ... with the fresh bloom—“a plumage of tender crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood”—the shops of the city hard by, the belfry with its giddy winding stair,—“half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows how far.”