him much
of a yearning and regret he experienced afterwards, towards he knew not
what, out of strange ways of feeling and thought in which, from time to
time, his spirit found itself alone; and in the tears shed in such
absences there seemed always to be some soul-subduing foretaste of what
his last tears might be.

And the sense of security could hardly have [181] been deeper, the
quiet of the child's soul being one with the quiet of its home, a place
"inclosed" and "sealed." But upon this assured place, upon the child's
assured soul which resembled it, there came floating in from the larger
world without, as at windows left ajar unknowingly, or over the high
garden walls, two streams of impressions, the sentiments of beauty and
pain--recognitions of the visible, tangible, audible loveliness of
things, as a very real and somewhat tyrannous element in them--and of
the sorrow of the world, of grown people and children and animals, as a
thing not to be put by in them. From this point he could trace two
predominant processes of mental change in him--the growth of an almost
diseased sensibility to the spectacle of suffering, and, parallel with
this, the rapid growth of a certain capacity of fascination by bright
colour and choice form--the sweet curvings, for instance, of the lips
of those who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in such delicate
unison to the things they said or sang,--marking early the activity in
him of a more than customary sensuousness, "the lust of the eye," as
the Preacher says, which might lead him, one day, how far! Could he
have foreseen the weariness of the way! In music sometimes the two
sorts of impressions came together, and he would weep, to the surprise
of older people. Tears of joy too the child knew, also to older
people's surprise; real tears, once, of relief from long-strung, [182]
childish expectation, when he found returned at evening, with new roses
in her cheeks, the little sister who had been to a place where there
was a wood, and brought back for him a treasure of fallen acorns, and
black crow's feathers, and his peace at finding her again near him
mingled all night with some intimate sense of the distant forest, the
rumour of its breezes, with the glossy blackbirds aslant and the
branches lifted in them, and of the perfect nicety of the little cups
that fell. So those two elementary apprehensions of the tenderness and
of the colour in things grew apace in him, and were se