4 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. I. 



baby sister slept her last sleep, he learned perhaps the first 

 lesson of death and immortality ; and, as he had attained 

 the age of seven when the sister of four years, and the 

 brother of one, were taken away within two months of each 

 other, he was capable of realizing somewhat at least of that 

 which is learned only in such times of darkness. " 1 saw," 

 he wrote in the last year of his life, "in early childhood or 

 boyhood, so many little brothers and sisters die, that the 

 darkness of those scenes, and the anguish of father and 

 mother, made an indelible impression upon me." It was 

 his belief that the human mind loses no impression ever 

 made on it, and that the events of infancy, though they 

 cannot be recalled, are not effaced, and will probably, like 

 wonders revealed in a palimpsest, come up for review in the 

 future life. 1 It may be that the distress he ever felt, on 

 hearing of or witnessing suffering in young children, origi- 

 nated in those early experiences. 



But though so soon reaping the benefits of a yoke borne 

 in youth, let it not be supposed that his was a gloomy 

 childhood: Far otherwise; his keen susceptibilities were 

 open to joy as fully as to sorrow. His healthy, active 

 frame, accustomed to boyish sports, made life itself a 

 pleasure ; warm affections bound him closely to each one 



1 He thus writes in one of his letters : "I have always thought, 

 and even declared in my lectures, that the most wonderful of all 

 books would be the Autobiography of a Baby ; but since I fear that 

 you will not be able to coax either Freddy or Malcolm to make 

 your fortune by writing it, I go on to suggest that in the life that is 

 to come, our' memory of the past will go back over all our earthly 

 reminiscences, not merely over all that we grown folks recall, but 

 over all that we have forgotten, which is at present most vivid to 

 your dear bairns. We shall mount to the origin of our individual 

 lives, and trace to their dim beginnings our first conceptions of space 

 and time, of our own individuality, and of other existences ; of an 

 inner consciousness and an outer universe." 



