ng. That impulse to creation
which all men feel, the impulse which makes the artist, is especially
active in a child; his games are his art. With a child material is not
an end but a means. Things are for him but the skeleton of life, to be
clothed upon by the flesh and blood reality of his own fashioning.
His feeling is in excess of his knowledge. He has a faculty of
perception other than the intellectual. It is imagination.

The child is the first artist. Out of the material around him he creates
a world of his own. The prototypes of the forms which he devises
exist in life, but it is the thing which he himself makes that interests
him, not its original in nature. His play is his expression. He creates;
and he is able to merge himself in the thing created. In his play he
loses all consciousness of self. He and the toy become one, caught
up in the larger unity of the game. According as he identifies himself
with the thing outside of him, the child is the first appreciator.

Then comes a change.

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."

Imagination surrenders to the intellect; emotion gives place to
knowledge.

Gradually the material world shuts in about us until it becomes for
us a hard, inert thing, and no longer a living, changing presence,
instinct with infinite possibilities of experience and feeling. Now
custom lies upon us

"with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!"

It happens, unfortunately for our enjoyment of life, that we get used
to things. Little by little we come to accept them, to take them for
granted, and they cease to mean anything to us. Habit, which is our
most helpful ally in lending our daily life its practical efficiency, is
the foe of emotion and appreciation. Habit allows us to perform
without conscious effort the innumerable little acts of each day's
necessity which we could not possibly accomplish if every single act
required a fresh exercise of will. But just because its action is
unconscious and unregarded, habit blunts the edge of our