s betraying so total and singular a want of natural sensibility as
may well excuse the deficiencies of his following arguments. For there
was never yet the child of any promise (so far as the theoretic
faculties are concerned) but awaked to the sense of beauty with the
first gleam of reason; and I suppose there are few, among those who love
nature otherwise than by profession and at second-hand, who look not
back to their youngest and least-learned days as those of the most
intense, superstitious, insatiable, and beatific perception of her
splendors. And the bitter decline of this glorious feeling, though many
note it not, partly owing to the cares and weight of manhood, which
leave them not the time nor the liberty to look for their lost treasure,
and partly to the human and divine affections which are appointed to
take its place, yet has formed the subject not indeed of lamentation,
but of holy thankfulness for the witness it bears to the immortal origin
and end of our nature, to one whose authority is almost without appeal
in all questions relating to the influence of external things upon the
pure human soul.

"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."

And if it were possible for us to recollect all the unaccountable and
happy instincts of the careless time, and to reason upon them with the
maturer judgment, we might arrive at more rapid and right results than
either the philosophy or the sophisticated practice of art have yet
attained. But we lose the perceptions before we are capable of
methodizing or comparing them.

Sec. 3. The child instinct respecting space.

Sec. 4. Continued in after life.

One, however, of these child instincts, I believe that few forget; the
emotion, namely, caused by all open ground, or lines of any spacious
kind against the sky, behind which there might be conceived the sea. It
is an emotion more pure than that caused by the sea itself, for I
recollect distinctly running down behi