🥀 We lose, by mere growing, something of the good habit of familiarity
with the old and fresh earth—the familiarity, especially, of the eyes
and hands—that is the child’s amends for his neglect of the sky. We hold
our heads up—or we should do so—and lift our eyes to the horizon, and
upwards from it, and to the tops of steeples and towers; but a child
hardly looks up at all, or no higher than his father’s face. It seems
that many a grazing and labouring animal feeds through its last long day
and draws its last load without having ever looked aloft. Some kinds
lift their heads a little when they utter calls or cries, but those are
moments of preoccupation, and their attention is not in their eyes.
🥀 The eyes of a child, if not so long and so unconsciously bent away as
the animals’ from the sources of light and darkness and of the rains,
are still so little interested in the heights as to need the rising of a
bird to show them the way cloudward. The bird leaves a branch shaken,
and the hurry of the leaves makes a child look, and, before he is aware
that his eyes have taken flight, they are captured by the lark into that
unwonted liberty, and beguiled into the manumission of blue sky. The
child’s sight hardly rises but as an arrow following the bird.
🥀 Otherwise the little gaze of those untravelled eyes is busy at close
quarters with their own matters. It is not in vain that the senses of
children in their simplicity are familiar with delicate shows and
scents. While we walk, breathing at the levels of lilac-trees and
hawthorn, they have to breathe the fresh and strange odour of moss in
the woods. Nor is there a breath of the breathing undergrowth that does
not find its way to the spirit of a child, to create memories there.
Either those wild and most homely scents that are close to the ground
have in themselves more significance than have all the richer sweets
that blossom breast-high, or else it is their direct communication with
childhood that makes them magical. A child without a sense of the earth
would miss as much as a child—if one could be—without a sense of the
past.
🥀 Children poring over the ground make friends of a thousand little
creatures that the elders have long ago forgotten. The child knows the
spiritual-rustic scent of small daisies, though probably a great number
of grown-up people have not been for many consecutive springs at the
trouble of smelling a quite small wild daisy; one poet has had so short
a memory as to call the daisies “smell-less”; and so with other kinds of
growth. There are ways of the clinging of ivy, many-footed, to be known
only on the terms of childhood, and so with the little animals that find
their way in the green twilight of blades of grass. Their fortunes are
watched by children, who are so near them, and who would—if they might
but know something of the work in hand—think themselves happy to use
their superior strength and larger outlook in helping the industries of
little ants and beetles. This may never be; the errands of the hurry of
insects are not to be shared. And even in his consciousness of greater
size and all other human conditions, the child is aware of his own one
disproportionate disadvantage—he knows well that the ants and beetles
are grown up. Only in the business of feeding he finds that he can come
to an understanding with all kinds, or nearly all kinds, of small
animals, and be useful.
🥀 He finds a city of ants most pleasantly responsive; there are no
mistakes or misapprehensions. Dear were the ants in a wide stone
_loggia_ long ago, where they came up through the cracks to take their
crumbs in the sunshine, until Benedetta swept them with a besom of
destruction, and said in reply to the weeping (and, too probably, the
fists) of the children that the ants were not Christians. The little
ants—the little grown-up ants, who had something of our respect for
aunts, and among whom we perceived differences of size and of
manners—were involved in indiscriminate slaughter, like soldiers.
🥀 It is at close quarters, near the ground of gardens and fields,
that·children learn to know the countries, the counties, the north, the
south, the orient, and the occident. The country that children pore over
is surely the country of memories for which men afterwards die. For
this, rather than for any distant plains, or valleys, or even mountains
(for which armies have been said to be most willing to take the field).
The country that sent the breath and spirit of its earth into the little
nostrils of children, that was known in tiny detail, that was known in
that low region of the earthy air through which the elders pass with
their covered feet—this has always been _patria_.
🥀 It is a loss never to have lived young in countries so warm that a
child is allowed to feel the grass there with naked feet. For the feet
also ought to have communication with the fields; they have their own
sensation of flowers. Even as all the senses are distinct and different,
and as it were a separate conception of the mind, so also are the
sensibilities. They are not merely added ways of communion, they are all
unique ways. To lack the sensibility of feet that might have been
acquainted with various Nature, but that had their tenderness touched by
nothing save dead sand at the seaside, is a little loss that one wishes
the civilized child had not to undergo.