e fear that very likely it might? These
things come across the mind of a little boy with a curious grief and
bewilderment. Ah, there is something strange in the inner life of a
thoughtful child of eight years old! I would rather see a faithful
record of his thoughts, feelings, fancies, and sorrows, for a single
week, than know all the political events that have happened during that
space in Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Turkey. Even amid
the great grief at leaving home for school in your early days, did you
not feel a greater grief to think that the day might come when you would
not care at all; when your home ties and affections would be outgrown;
when you would be quite content to live on, month after month, far from
parents, sisters, brothers, and feel hardly a perceptible blank when you
remembered that they were far away? But it is of the essence of such
fears, that, when the thing comes that you were afraid of, it has ceased
to be fearful; still it is with a little pang that you sometimes call to
remembrance how much you feared it once. It is a daily regret, though
not a very acute one, (more's the pity,) to be thrown much, in middle
life, into the society of an old friend whom as a boy you had regarded
as very wise, and to be compelled to observe that he is a tremendous
fool. You struggle with the conviction; you think it wrong to give in to
it; but you cannot help it. But it would have been a sharper pang to the
child's heart, to have impressed upon the child the fact, that "Good Mr.
Goose is a fool, and some day you will understand that he is." In those
days one admits no imperfection in the people and the things one likes.
You like a person; and _he is good. That_ seems the whole case. You do
not go into exceptions and reservations. I remember how indignant I
felt, as a boy, at reading some depreciatory criticism of the "Waverley
Novels." The criticism was to the effect that the plots generally
dragged at first, and were huddled up at the end. But to me the novels
were enchaining, enthralling; and to hint a defect in them stunned one.
In the boy's feeling, if a thing be good, why, there cannot be anything
bad about it. But in the man's mature judgment, even in the people he
likes best, and in the things he appreciates most highly, there are many
flaws and imperfections. It does not vex us much now to find that this
is so; but it would have greatly vexed us many years since to have
been told that it