Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/14

8 absorption more complete, no insight more exquisite and, one might even add, more comprehensive. As we strive to look back and to live our past again, can we recall any joy, fear, hope or disappointment more extreme than those of our childhood, any love more impulsive and unquestioning, and, alas, any boredom so unmitigated and unutterable?

We call their faith, even in ourselves, credulity; and are grown perhaps so accustomed to life's mysteries that we pale at their candour. "I am afraid you cannot understand it, dear," exclaimed a long-suffering mother, at the end of her resources. "O yes, I can very well," was her little boy's reply, "if only you would not explain." "Why is there such a lot of things in the world if no one knows all these things?" ran another small mind's inquiry. And yet another: "Perhaps the world is a fancy, mother. Shall I wake from this dream?"

We speak indulgently of childish make-believe, childish fancy. Bret Harte was nearer the truth when he maintained that "the dominant expression of a child is gravity." The cold fact is that few of us have the energy to be serious at their pitch. There runs a jingle:

O, whither go all the nights and days?

And where can to-morrow be?