knew, in fact, that there was good and evil in the world, good and bad
men, and the bad men--murderers, thieves, and liars--would all have to
die, just like animals; but that there was any life after death I did
not know. All the others, myself and my own people included, were good
and would never taste death. How it came about that I had got no
further in my system or philosophy of life I cannot say; I can only
suppose that my mother had not yet begun to give me instruction in
such matters on account of my tender years, or else that she had done
so and that I had understood it in my own way. Yet, as I discovered
later, she was a religious woman, and from infancy I had been taught
to kneel and say a little prayer each evening: "Now I lay me down to
sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep"; but who the Lord was or what
my soul was I had no idea. It was just a pretty little way of saying
in rhyme that I was going to bed. My world was a purely material one,
and a most wonderful world it was, but how I came to be in it I didn't
know; I only knew (or imagined) that I would be in it always, seeing
new and strange things every day, and never, never get tired of it. In
literature it is only in Vaughan, Traherne, and other mystics, that I
find any adequate expression of that perpetual rapturous delight in
nature and my own existence which I experienced at that period.

And now these never-to-be-forgotten words spoken over the grave of our
old dog had come to awaken me from that beautiful dream of perpetual
joy!

When I recall this event I am less astonished at my ignorance than at
the intensity of the feeling I experienced, the terrible darkness it
brought on so young a mind. The child's mind we think, and in fact
know, is like that of the lower animals; or if higher than the animal
mind, it is not so high as that of the simplest savage. He cannot