Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/15

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Is anyone there, when I&apos;m not there?

And why am I always Me?

With such metaphysical riddles as these—riddles which no philosopher has yet answered to anybody's but his own entire satisfaction—children entertain the waking moments of their inward reverie. They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence into a waking vision. We can approach them only by way of intuition and remembrance, only by becoming even as one of them; though there are many books—Sully's "Studies of Childhood," for instance, Mr Gosse's "Father and Son," John Ruskin's "Præterita," Serge Aksakoff's "Years of Childhood," Henry James's "A Small Boy and Others"—which will be a really vivid and quiet help in times of difficulty.

This broken dream, then, this profound self-communion, this innocent peace and wonder make up the secret existence of a really childlike child: while the intellect is only stirring.

Then, suddenly life flings open the door of the nursery. The child becomes a boy. I do not mean that the transformation is as instantaneous as that, though, if I may venture to give a personal testimony, I have seen two children plunge out into the morning for the first time to