Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/77

 its past. There is nothing here of the sociologist's notebook, nor of the overworked optic nerve of the photographer-realist. Memory has discarded everything that is not memorable, quick, delicious, pungent, or enchanting to the revisiting mind. There are reminiscences of childhood raptures here as exquisite as that passage in Rousseau in which he remembers how he and his father read romances together till they were reminded that it was morning by the swallows twittering under the eaves. Take, for example, this recovery of the child's delight in learning to read—not forgetting that Mr. Dell's impulse to revise educational method derives from this source:

After young Felix has learned to wander on short excursions into "the realms of gold" he has a curious fantasy one day in school while dreaming over how