The fact is that children have a simple sense of the unnecessary ugliness
of things, and that--apart from the effects of _ennui_--they reject that
ugliness actively. You have stood and listened to your mother's
compliments on her friend's hat, and have made your mental protest in
very definite words. You thought it hideous, and hideous things offended
you then more than they have ever offended you since. At nine years old
you made people, alas! responsible for their faces, as you do still in a
measure, though you think you do not. You severely made them answer for
their clothes, in a manner which you have seen good reason, in later
life, to mitigate. Upon curls, or too much youthfulness in the aged, you
had no mercy. To sum up the things you hated inordinately, they were
friskiness of manner and of trimmings, and curls combined with rather
bygone or frumpish fashions. Too much childish dislike was wasted so.

But you admired some things without regard to rules of beauty learnt
later. At some seven years old you dwelt with delight upon the contrast
of a white kid glove and a bright red wrist. Well, this is not the
received arrangement, but red and white do go well together, and their
distribution has to be taught with time. Whose were the wrist and glove?
Certainly some one's who must have been distressed at the _bouquet_ of
colour that you admired. This, however, was but a local admiration. You
did not admire the girl as a whole. She whom you adored was always a
married woman of a certain age; rather faded, it might be, but always
divinely elegant. She alone was worthy to stand at the side of your
mother. You lay in wait for the border of her train, and dodged for a
chance of holding her bracelet when she played. You composed prose in
honour of her and called the composition (for reasons unknown to
yourself) a "catalogue." She took singularly little notice of you.

Wordsworth cannot say too much of your passion for nature. The light of