100 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE NATURAL 



learn all that we had suspected our ignorance of, even from the time of 

 readinpr the story of Eyes and No Eyes, in the Evenings at Home afore- 

 mentioned. 



Ignorance, however, in our early days, was not the least of our 

 afflictions. There was wont to be a fiend, by name ennui, which devoured 

 many excellent famiUes. Want of books, and want of conversation (for 

 gossip is not conversation, and " talk is but a tinkling cymbal"), made 

 life nearly insupportable. When compelled to keep house, one had 

 nothing to reflect upon but the slow succession of meals. Little children, 

 dutiful and wretched, sate with their grandmothers and great aunts, at 

 old-fashioned windows, with " window seats," and all manner of unimagi- 

 native furniture, gazing on the passers-by, who were not numerous ; 

 whilst ancient clocks ticked on with sounds that spoke of a monotonous 

 age, and we wondered wherefore we were born, and imagined the world 

 was all as dull as the circle which enclosed our own expanding heart and 

 mind. Among the lumber of most houses were some old and dusty 

 volumes, which we read again and again : they were filled with odd stuff 

 enough ; and we often wonder now what they were, and by whom they 

 were written. Sundays came, too, with doleful tracts, and the ever- 

 lasting Thomas a Kempis. Dull commentaries read we, with small 

 edification, on the sacred scriptures ; and an invention of the older writers 

 called an '* improvement" on the said commentaries, duller than all. 



Far be it from us to depreciate the past generation unjustly. Scholars 

 there were in many little towns, who puzzled us in the holiday times by 

 inquiring the latin for articles of diet, little known to us either theo- 

 retically or practically, and humiliated us for their pedantic pastime : 

 philosophers, too, there were, in rural retreats ; elderly men in habits 

 of strange fashion, and arrayed in caps of velvet ; but whose merits were 

 little suspected by us, and lost to their neighbours in their simple 

 eccentricities. Marvellously clever people there were too in every 

 community, mechanical and ingenious, full of odds and ends of know- 

 ledge, but only known to boys by cranks and oddities, which made one 

 doubt their perfect sanity. As to the general character of respectable 

 people of moderate pretensions, it was precisely what we have described. 

 They were tolerably virtuous, and very dull ; they were " of the earth, 

 earthy," and nerves they had none. They knew nothing of the turmoils 

 and phantasies existing in those brains in which the organ of ideality was 

 full. They had never yet heard of such an organ. Of any changes taking 

 place in the modes of education, of any advantages that might arise from 

 the diffusion of a love of science, or, indeed, of the very meaning of 

 science, they never thought when awake or dreamed when asleep. 



Worse than all, feeling their own lives so dull, and looking back to the 

 mere eating and drinking* and gambolUng of boyhood and girlhood, 

 they, one and all, these good old people, assured us yawning children 

 that ours was the blissful period of life, and that we should never be so 

 happy as we were then. Something within us, ** something unearthly, 

 which they deemed not of," told us the contrary. We felt that we were 

 not created merely to eat and drink, and yawn, and listen to the clock, 

 and sleep ; and the result has verified the prophetic feeling. Life, with 

 all its cares, has proved, in comparison with those years of vegetable 

 existence, a scene of great happiness. We no longer live within the dull 

 confines of walls, but have learned to expatiate in a thousand fields full 

 of delightful thoughts. 



Wherefore, then, do we retrace the sullen and unideal hours of youth ? 

 We would shew the young of the present age what advantages they 

 enjoy, and the happiness which such advantages will bring, if not 



