s one of Origen's fancies that the
coats of skins given to Adam and Eve on their expulsion from Paradise
were their corporeal textures, and that in Eden they had neither flesh
nor blood, bones nor nerves. The opening soul, that puts back petal
after petal till the fructifying heart of it is bare to all the sweet
influences of the universe, is something lovely for older eyes to
see,--perhaps no lovelier than the lawful development of later lives to
larger eyes than ours,--perhaps no lovelier than that we are to undergo.
The first moment when the force of beauty strikes a child's perceptions
would be an ineffable one, if he had anything to compare it with or
measure it by; but as it is, even though it pierce him through and
through with rapture, he is not aware of that rapture till after-years
reproduce it for him and sweeten the sensation with full knowledge. The
child is so dear to the parents, because it is their own beings bound
together in one; the baby is so beautiful to all, because so sacred and
mysterious. Where was this life a moment since? Whither will it fleet a
moment hence? He may be a fiend or an archangel by and by, as he and
Fate together please; but now his little skin is like a blush rose-leaf,
and his little kisses are so tender and so dear! yet it is as an object
of nature that he charms, not in his identity as a sufferer of either
pain or pleasure. Childhood, by these blind worshippers of yesterday, is
simply so vaunted and so valued because it is seen again in the ideal:
the detail is lost in distance; the fair fact alone remains.

But yesterday has its uses, of more value than its idolatries. Though
too often with its aerial distances and borrowed hues it is a mere
pleasure region, instead of that great reservoir from which we might
draw fountains of inexhaustible treasure, yet, if we cultivated our
present from our past, homage to it might be as much to the purpose at
least as the Gheber's worship of the sun. The past is an atmosphere
weighing over each man's life. The skilful farmer with his
subsoil-plough lets down the wealthy air of the actual atmosphere into
his furrows, deeper than it ever went before; the greedy loam sucks in
the nitrogen there, and one day he finds his mould stored with ammonia,
the great fertilizer, worth many a harvest. Are they numerous who thus
enrich the present with the disengaged agents of the past, the chemic
powers obtained from that superincumbent atmosphere ever e