of
childhood there is more history and more philosophy to be fished up than
from all the printed volumes in a library. The child is conscious of an
interest, not in literature but in life. A taste for the precise, the
adroit or the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before
that he has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.
He is first conscious of this material--I had almost said this
practical--pre-occupation; it does not follow that it really came the
first. I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that would seem
to imply a prior stage. "The Lord is gone up with a shout, and God with
the sound of a trumpet"--memorial version, I know not where to find the
text--rings still in my ear from my first childhood, and perhaps with
something of my nurse's accent. There was possibly some sort of image
written in my mind by these loud words, but I believe the words
themselves were what I cherished. I had about the same time, and under
the same influence--that of my dear nurse--a favourite author: it is
possible the reader has not heard of him--the Rev. Robert Murray
M'Cheyne. My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I must
have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was breeched; and
I remember two specimens of his muse until this day:--

"Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown."

There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. The other--it is but a
verse--not only contains no image, but is quite unintelligible even to
my comparatively instructed mind, and I know not even how to spell the
outlandish vocable that charmed me in my childhood:

"Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her ";[34]

I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either, since I
had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse, from then to
now, a longer interval than the life of a generation, has continued to
haunt me.

I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious and
pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in images,
words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond
their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I came once
upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm, "The Lord is my Shepherd":
and from the places employed in its illustration, which are all in the
immediate neighbourhood of a hous