Many verses are omitted from this poem for want of space, and the last two are transposed in order.

Here two fine thoughts of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Browning are inspired by the vision of Monica, the saintly mother of the great St. Augustine (354-430).

This is a good illustration of the need of notes. Without a reference to St. Monica’s vision, I think that readers would be repelled, rather than attracted, by Mrs. Browning’s sonnet. It does not accord with one’s sense of modesty that a lady should say to her lover, “My unattractive person and incurable illness turned other men away, but you saw that, behind all this, I was ‘a patient angel waiting for a place in the new Heavens.’” I myself could not understand how Mrs. Browning could write and her husband could publish this poem, until Hodgson, in one of his letters to me, referred to “the use made by Mrs. Browning of St. Monica’s vision in one of her sonnets.”

The sonnet is not quoted as one of the finest of the series.

I have placed Mrs. Stowe’s quotation first for an obvious reason; but The Minister’s Wooing was published in 1859, while the sonnet appeared in 1847.

See note to next quotation.

As Coleridge says in the last quotation, “We receive but what we give.” We bring with us the mind that sees, and the feelings and emotions with which we contemplate the universe; and, so far as use, habit, and other causes still the activity and lessen the receptivity of the mind and spirit, the world around us becomes less instinct with life and beauty.

Putting aside the question whether, as Wordsworth says in his great Ode,

it will be familiar to anyone who has a sympathetic, appreciative sense that the child’s outlook on the world around him is very different from our own. It has in him a more intense emotional reaction. He sees it with a freshness and wonder unfelt by us, because our sensibility is blunted and less vivid. And for the same reason that we trust our faculties in their prime rather than in their degeneration, so the fresh and clear emotional response of a child’s nature represents more truthful appreciation than our own. Our sensibility is blunted, not only by use and habit, but also by the hardening and coarsening experiences of our lives; and also again by the development of intellect, which grows largely at the expense of the emotions. We lose the transparent soul of the child, his simple faith and trusting nature. To anyone who cannot feel the difference between the child’s outlook and his own, this will convey no meaning—and words cannot assist him. It is as if one tried to describe love to a person who has never loved, or a religious experience to one who has never had such an experience, indeed, in both love and religious experience, there is the same child-like attitude of pure emotion; and hence Christ’s comparison of His true followers to “little children.” Poetry, music, love of nature, and the highest art produce in us at times the same indefinable feeling and give us back for evanescent periods the fresh, clear, emotional sensibility of a child.

In Edward Fitzgerald’s Euphranor, at the point where Wordsworth’s ode is being discussed, the following passage is interesting:—

“I have heard tell of another poet’s saying that he knew of no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant’s eyes; and how it was from those of his own he learned that those of the Divine Child in Raffaelle’s Sistine Madonna were not overcharged with expression, as he had previously thought they might be.”

“Yes,” said I, “that was on the occasion, I think, of his having watched his child one morning worshipping the sunbeam on the bedpost—I suppose the worship of wonder.... If but the philosopher or poet could live in the child’s brain for a while!”

(The poet referred to was Tennyson, see Memoir by his son, the baby in question, Vol. I., 357).

Arcadia was a mountainous district in Greece which was taken to be the deal of pastoral simplicity and rural happiness—as in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and other literature. It was famous for its musicians and a favourite haunt of Pan.

The saying is best known from the fine landscape in the Louvre by N. Poussin (1594-1665). In part of the landscape is a tomb on which these words are written, and some young people are seen reading them. I learn, however, from King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations that the words had been previously written on a picture by Bart. Schidone (1570-1615), where two young shepherds are looking at a skull.

The meaning intended was that death came even to the joyous shepherds of Arcady. But the quotation is now used in a more general sense. “I too had my golden days of youth and love and happiness.”

This is from an article in The Nineteenth Century for November, 1886, in which Myers urged the study of the trance-personalities that exhibit themselves under hypnotism. In his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death his views on sleep may be very briefly summarized as follows: In the low forms of animal life there is an undifferentiated state, neither sleep nor waking, and this is also seen in our prenatal and earliest infantile life. In life generally the waking time can exist only for brief periods continuously. We cannot continue life without resort to the fuller vitality which sleep brings to us. Again, from the original undifferentiated state, our waking life has been developed by practical needs; the faculties required for our earthly life then become intensified, but by natural selection other faculties and sensations (including those which connect us with the spiritual world) are dropped out of our consciousness. The state of sleep cannot be regarded as the mere absence of waking faculties. In this state we have some faint glimmer of the other faculties and sensations in various forms—dreams, somnambulism, etc. Myers then develops the theory that the relations of hysteria and genius to ordinary life correspond to those of somnambulism and hypnotic trance to sleep; and he arrives at the question of self-suggestion and hypnotism generally.

Thus in sleep there are, first, certain physiological changes (including a greater control of the physical organism, as seen in the muscular powers of somnambulists); no length of time spent lying down awake in darkness and silence will give the recuperative effect that even a few moments of sleep will give. But also, secondly, we find existing in sleep the other faculties withdrawn from use in ordinary waking life. Thus during sleep we find memory revived, problems unexpectedly solved, poems like “Kubla Khan” composed, and many intense sensations and emotions experienced. Beyond these powers again Myers finds in sleep still higher powers which seem to connect us with the spiritual world. Hence the advisability of studying the phenomena of sleep and investigating it experimentally by employing hypnotism.

William James adopted much the same view as Myers (see, for example, The Varieties of Religious Experience). But much has been written of late about sub-consciousness and about dreams; and the tendency is rather to follow Martineau’s view of mental development—that the lower nervous centres are unconscious “habits” deposited from the old intelligence (see p. 304). Thus, for instance, memories of the past would be recorded in the sub-conscious, but there is nothing to be found there of a higher character than in the conscious self. In sleep, the waking control being removed, our dreams reveal impulses and desires that have been inhibited or kept under in waking life, but do not reveal anything of the higher indicated by Myers. However, although it is too large a subject to discuss here, there is a vast deal yet to be explained, as, for example, inspiration, and what we used to call “unconscious cerebration,” and the amazing results of hypnotism and suggestion. Also who or what is it that composes the dream-story, or who or what makes us act or dream the story?

The Ship is the ship of life. The first line is taken from Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Where lies the land to which yon Ship must go.”

See Note on page 155.

See Note on page 155.

These fresh, clear, spontaneous verses have a special value. They bring us a promise of Spring—the message that we may still hope for a revival of English Poetry.

Therefore, I have included them (in this third edition) although they are outside the general scope of my book.

Miss Betty Bray has been writing since she was seven years of age. She writes with great facility and has already filled two manuscript books. Her verses are entirely her own, no defects being pointed out or other assistance or guidance given her.

She was born on June 11th, 1906. She is the daughter of Mr. Denys de Saumarez Bray, C.S.I., and the grand-niece of my late partner the Hon. Sir John Bray, K.C.M.G., who was Premier of South Australia. Her grandfather was born in Adelaide.

Milton refers to his blindness in this and other passages—as in the well known sonnet.

The poor man wants a new cloak, but his wife objects.

The verse is sung by Iago (Othello, Act II., Sc. 3), the words being a little different.

Beddoes intended to destroy this poem, but it was published without his knowledge. This is one of the cases where artists have shown themselves incapable critics of their own work.