trialism—it was probably inevitable that those living in Mill's "age of transition" should discover in their own recollections of childhood the most compelling image of lost innocence. The nineteenth century "shifted onto the child ... the obscure tradition of pastoral," as William Empson has observed. Rousseau had already "laid down" the "incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart." In Emile, he struck a note that was to be sounded again and again. "Love childhood, indulge its games, its pleasures, and its lovable nature. Who has not looked back with regret on an age when laughter is always on the lips and when the spirit is always at peace?" Childhood provided Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Dickens, Hardy, Lewis Carroll, and innumerable lesser talents with a haunting vocabulary of loss that could be exploited for social criticism as well as for poetry and fiction or, trivialized and sentimentalized, for pious moralizing about the happy fate of those who die young.

Literary exploration of childhood, ranging from Wordsworth's solemn rapture to the sentimentalism of J. M. Barrie, helps to clarify the distinction between nostalgia and a more active type of remembrance that seeks to grasp the past's formative influence on the present. Samuel Taylor Coleridge contrasted the healing power of a "joyful and tender" memory with the dismissive attitude to the past that leads men to "laugh at the falsehoods that were imposed on themselves during their childhood"; but his remarkably astute analysis of the difference between them applies with equal force to the nostalgic attitude, another way of dismissing the past. Those who remember childhood only as a time when they were "imposed on," Coleridge wrote—and also those who remember it, we might add, as a time of blissful innocence untroubled by self-conscious reflection—

are not good and wise enough to contemplate the Past in the Present, and so to produce by a virtuous and thoughtful sensibility that continuity in their self-consciousness, which nature has made the law of their animal life. Ingratitude, sensuality, and hardness of heart all flow from this source. Men are ungrateful to others only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They exist in frag

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