e
hours, but he is not interested in it. It is the inexperienced child who
passes with simplicity through the marginal country; and the thing he
meets there is principally the yet further conception of illimitable
time.

His nurse's lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time. She sings
absolutely immemorial words. It matters little what they may mean to
waking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of the
beginning of the world. He has fallen asleep to the sound of them all
his life; and "all his life" means more than older speech can well
express.

Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year. A child is beset
with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere
adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further
back--it is already so far. That is, it looks as remote to the memory of
a man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy. What are a mere forty
years of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance? Pshaw!

EYES

There is nothing described with so little attention, with such
slovenliness, or so without verification--albeit with so much confidence
and word-painting--as the eyes of the men and women whose faces have been
made memorable by their works. The describer generally takes the first
colour that seems to him probable. The grey eyes of Coleridge are
recorded in a proverbial line, and Procter repeats the word, in
describing from the life. Then Carlyle, who shows more signs of actual
attention, and who caught a trick of Coleridge's pronunciation instantly,
proving that with his hearing at least he was not slovenly, says that
Coleridge's eyes were brown--"strange, brown, timid, yet earnest-looking
eyes." A Coleridge with brown eyes is one man, and a Coleridge with grey
eyes another--and, as it were, more responsible. As to Rossetti's eyes,
the various inattention of his friends has assigned to them, in all the
ready-made phrases, nearly all the colours.

So with Charlotte Bronte. Matthew Arnold seems to have thought the most
probable thing to be said of her eyes was that they were grey and
expressive. Thus, after seeing them, does he describe them in one of his
letters. Whereas Mrs Gaskell, who shows signs of attention, says that
Charlotte's eyes were a reddish hazel, made up of "a great variety of
tints," to be discovered by close looking. Almost all eves that are not
brown are, in fact, of some such m