ROSA QUO LOCORUM
Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it
should be not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A
matter of curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science
to-morrow. From the mind of childhood there is more history and
more philosophy to be fished up than from all the printed volumes
in a library. The child is conscious of an interest, not in
literature but in life. A taste for the precise, the adroit, or
the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before that he
has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.
He is first conscious of this material - I had almost said this
practical - pre-occupation; it does not follow that it really came
the first. I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that
would seem to imply a prior stage 'The Lord is gone up with a
shout, and God with the sound of a trumpet' - memorial version, I
know not where to find the text - rings still in my ear from my
first childhood, and perhaps with something of my nurses accent.
There was possibly some sort of image written in my mind by these
loud words, but I believe the words themselves were what I
cherished. I had about the same time, and under the same
influence - that of my dear nurse - a favourite author: it is
possible the reader has not heard of him - the Rev. Robert Murray
M'Cheyne. My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I
must have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was
breeched; and I remember two specimens of his muse until this day:-
'Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown.'
There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. The other - it is
but a verse - not only contains no image, but is quite
unintelligible even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know
not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my
childhood:
'Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her'; {6} -
I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either,
since I had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse,
from then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation,
has continued to haunt me.
I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious
and pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in
images, words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture
eloquent beyond their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes
of memory, I came once upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm,
'The Lord is my shepherd':
