This Refers To Scenes
Visualized With The Inner Eye, But The Disillusion Is Almost
As Great When We Return To A Home Left In Childhood Or Boyhood
And Look On It Once More With The Man's Eyes.
How small it
is!
How diminished the hills, and the trees that grew to such
a vast height, whose tops once seemed "so close against the
sky" - what poor little trees they now are! And the house
itself, how low it is; and the rooms that seemed so wide and
lofty, where our footfalls and childish voices sounded as in
some vast hall, how little and how mean they look!
Children, they are very little,
the poet says, and they measure things by their size; but it
seems odd that unless we grow up amid the scenes where our
first impressions were received they should remain unaltered
in the adult mind. The most amusing instance of a false
picture of something seen in childhood and continuing through
life I have met was that of an Italian peasant I knew in South
America. He liked to talk to me about the cranes, those great
and wonderful birds he had become acquainted with in childhood
in his home on the plains of Lombardy. The birds, of course,
only appeared in autumn and spring when migrating, and passed
over at a vast height above the earth. These birds, he said,
were so big and had such great wings that if they came down on
the flat earth they would be incapable of rising, hence they
only alighted on the tops of high mountains, and as there was
nothing for them to eat in such places, it being naked rock
and ice, they were compelled to subsist on each other's
droppings.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 232 of 298
Words from 63570 to 63863
of 82198
