STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 327 



bly due to tlie iincanny look of a sort of ghost life as the light, 

 unsubstantial thing slowly moves of itself from the ground and 

 poises in mid-air. Perha]3S a dog's uneasiness at the sight of leaves 

 whisked in an eddy over the ground by the wind shows a degree 

 of the same personifying instinct. Sometimes this endowment of 

 things with sensation leads to a quaint manifestation of sympa- 

 thj'-. Miss Ingelow writes of herself when a little over two years 

 old and for about a year after : " I had the habit of attributing in- 

 telligence not only to all living creatures, the same amount and 

 kind of intelligence that I had myself, but even to stones and 

 manufactured articles. I used to feel how dull it must be for the 

 pebbles in the causeway to be obliged to lie still and only see what 

 was round about. When I walked out with a little basket for 

 putting flowers in I used sometimes to pick up a pebble or two 

 and carry them on to have a change ; then at the farthest point 

 of the walk turn them out, not doubting that they would be 

 pleased to have a new view." * 



This is by no means a unique example of a childish lavishing 

 of pity on what we think the insentient world. Plant life seems 

 often to excite the feeling. Here is a quotation from a parent's 

 chronicle. A girl aged eight brings a quantity of fallen autumn 



leaves in to her mother, who says, "Oh! how pretty, F !" to 



which the girl answers : " Yes, I knew you'd love the poor things, 

 mother. I couldn't bear to see them dying on the ground." A 

 few days afterward she was found standing at a window over- 

 looking the garden, crying bitterly at the leaves as they fell in 

 considerable numbers. 



This is not the place to speak of the rich endowment of the 

 animal world with human susceptibilities by the childish imagi- 

 nation. We all know how grotesquely the little humanitarian 

 insists on fondling pussy, or wiping her nose, and otherwise tor- 

 menting that long-sufi^ering quadruped, all from the kindest of 

 motives. 



Now it may be asked whether all this analogical extension of 

 images to what seem to us such incongruous objects involves a 

 vivid and illusory apprehension of these as transformed. Is the 

 eyelid realized and even seen for the moment as a sort of curtain, 

 the curtain image blending with and transforming what is present 

 to the eye ? Are the pebbles actually looked at as living things 

 condemned to lie stiffly in one place ? It is of course hard to say, 

 yet I think a conjectural answer can be given. In this imagina- 

 tive contemplation of things the child only half observes what is 

 present to its eyes. One or two points of supreme interest in the 

 visible thing, the falling of the leaf, the hiding of the eye by the 



* See her article The Historv of an Infancy. Longman's Magazine, February, 1890. 



