ly wish what I was never permitted for an instant
to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw
in toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to play with as long as I was
capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew
older I had a cart and a ball, and when I was five or six years
old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I
still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always
summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled
on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life
and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the
square and comparing the colors of my carpet, examining the knots
in the wood of the floors, or counting the bricks in the opposite
houses, with rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling
of the water-cart through its leathern pipe from the dripping iron
post at the pavement edge, or the still more admirable proceedings
of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang
up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I
could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined,
were my chief resources; and my attention to the particulars in
these was soon so accurate that when at three and a half I was
taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been
ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes
in his carpet."

He was once taken when a child to the brow of the crags overlooking
Derwentwater, and he tells of the "intense joy, mingled with awe, that I
had in looking through the hollows in the mossy roots over the crag into
the dark lake, and which has associated itself more or less with all
twining roots of trees ever since." He also speaks of his joy in first
treading on the grass; and, indeed, each fresh bit of acquaintance which
he made with Nature gave him unbounded delight. He says in his late
"Recollections:"--

"To my further great benefit, as I grew older I saw nearly all the
noblemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of
uncovetous admiration,--perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any
political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live
in a small house and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than
to live in Warwick Castle a