fresh meat, or "the fairies who turned pumpkins into coaches and lizards
into footmen" beside all the marvels of reality, which already he was
beginning to perceive?

For above all things he was born a poet: a poet by instinct and by
vocation. From his earliest childhood, "the brain hardly released from the
swaddling-bands of unconsciousness," the things of the outer world left a
profound and living impression. As far back as he can remember, while still
quite a child, "a little monkey of six, still dressed in a little baize
frock," or just "wearing his first braces," he sees himself "in ecstasy
before the splendours of the wing-cases of a gardener-beetle, or the wings
of a butterfly." At nightfall, among the bushes, he learned to recognize
the chirp of the grasshopper. To put it in his own words, "he made for the
flowers and insects as the Pieris makes for the cabbage and the Vanessa
makes for the nettle." The riches of the rocks; the life which swarms in
the depth of the waters; the world of plants and animals, that "prodigious
poem; all nature filled him with curiosity and wonder." "A voice charmed
him; untranslatable; sweeter than language and vague as a dream." (1/3.)

These peculiarities are all the more astonishing in that they seem to be
absolutely spontaneous and in nowise hereditary. What his parents were he
himself has told us: small farmers, cultivating a little unprofitable land;
poor "husbandmen, sowers of rye, cowherds"; and in the wretched
surroundings of his childhood, when the only light, of an evening, came
from a splinter of pine, steeped in resin, which was held by a strip of
slate stuck into the wall; when his folk shut themselves in the byre, in
times of severe cold, to save a little firewood and while away the
evenings; when close at hand, through the bitter wind, they heard the
howling of the wolves: here, it would seem, was nothing propitious to the
birth of such tastes, if he had not borne them naturally within him.