138 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



social Lamb is at his deepest in recalling the child who 

 was solitary in the great house and garden of Blakesmoor. 

 With some the reason for this priority of Nature is that 

 her solitudes are the most rich. The presence of other 

 children and of adults is comparatively commonplace, 

 and in becoming, permanently or temporarily, part of a 

 community, the spirit makes some sacrifice. Provided, 

 then, that a child is happy and at ease in the solitude of 

 Nature, it is more open than in company to what is after- 

 wards regarded as spiritual intercourse. But above all, 

 our memories of Nature are seldom or never flawed by 

 the seeming triviality, the dislikes, the disgusts, the mis- 

 understandings which give to memories of human society 

 something of dulness and the commonplace. Thinking 

 of ourselves and other children, we may also think of 

 things which make idealization impossible. Thinking of 

 ourselves in a great wood or field of flowers ever so long 

 ago, it is hard not to exaggerate whatever give-and-take 

 there was between the spirit of the child and the vast pure 

 forces of the sun and the wind. In those days we did not 

 see a tree as a column of a dark stony substance support- 

 ing a number of green wafers that live scarcely half a 

 year, and grown for the manufacture of furniture, gates, 

 and many other things; but we saw something quite 

 unlike ourselves, large, gentle, of foreign tongue, without 

 locomotion, yet full of the life and movement and sound 

 of the leaves themselves, and also of the light, of the 

 birds, and of the insects; and they were givers of a clear, 

 deep joy that cannot be expressed. The brooding mind 

 easily exalts this joy with the help of the disillusions 

 and the knowledge and the folly and the thought of later 

 years. A little time ago I heard of the death of one 



