lves to it, though
this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life;
earlier, in some degree, we see inwardly; and the child finds for
itself, and with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, in
those whites and reds through the smoke on very homely buildings, and
in the gold of the dandelions at the road-side, just beyond the houses,
where not a handful of earth is virgin and untouched, in the lack of
better ministries to its desire of beauty.

[176] This house then stood not far beyond the gloom and rumours of the
town, among high garden-wall, bright all summer-time with Golden-rod,
and brown-and-golden Wall-flower--Flos Parietis, as the children's
Latin-reading father taught them to call it, while he was with them.
Tracing back the threads of his complex spiritual habit, as he was used
in after years to do, Florian found that he owed to the place many
tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him, certain inward lights
under which things most naturally presented themselves to him. The
coming and going of travellers to the town along the way, the shadow of
the streets, the sudden breath of the neighbouring gardens, the
singular brightness of bright weather there, its singular darknesses
which linked themselves in his mind to certain engraved illustrations
in the old big Bible at home, the coolness of the dark, cavernous shops
round the great church, with its giddy winding stair up to the pigeons
and the bells--a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble--all this
acted on his childish fancy, so that ever afterwards the like aspects
and incidents never failed to throw him into a well-recognised
imaginative mood, seeming actually to have become a part of the texture
of his mind. Also, Florian could trace home to this point a pervading
preference in himself for a kind of comeliness and dignity, an urbanity
literally, in modes of life, which he connected with the pale [177]
people of towns, and which made him susceptible to a kind of exquisite
satisfaction in the trimness and well-considered grace of certain
things and persons he afterwards met with, here and there, in his way
through the world.

So the child of whom I am writing lived on there quietly; things
without thus ministering to him, as he sat daily at the window with the
birdcage hanging below it, and his mother taught him to read, wondering
at the ease with which he learned, and at the quickness of his memory.
The perfume of the l