kind that poets have by instinct. "In moments of grief and despair,"
he wrote in later life, "I do not, as some do, crouch back to the
bosom of the great Mother; she has, it seems, no heart for me when I
am sorry, though she smiles with me when I am glad." But he has told
me that he is able to enjoy a simple village scene in a way that
others can not easily understand: a chestnut crowded with pink
spires, the clack of a mill-wheel, the gush of a green sluice out
of a mantled pool, a little stream surrounded by flags and water
lobelias, gave him all his life a keen satisfaction in his happy
moments. "I always gravitate to water," he writes. "I could stop
and look at a little wayside stream for hours; and a pool—I never
tire of it, though it awes me when I am alone."

The boy was afraid of trees, as many children are. If he had to go
out alone he always crossed the fields, and never went by the wood;
wandering in a wood at night was a childish nightmare of a peculiarly
horrible kind.

I quote a few childish stories about him, selecting them out of a
large number.

His mother saying to him one day that the gardener was dead, he burst
out laughing (with that curious hysteria so common in children), and
then after a little asked if they were going to bury him.

His mother, wishing to familiarize him with the idea of continued
existence after death, dwelt on the fact that it was only his body
that was going to be buried: his soul was in heaven.

The boy said presently, "If his body is in the churchyard, and his