Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 38

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The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable : so much
a man may lay down without fear of public ribaldry ; for although we
shake our heads over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold
advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse, we more
than gain in the habit of generously watching others ; and the capacity
to enjoy Shakspeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers.
Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover ; we no longer see the devil in
the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind. We go to school
no more ; and if we have only exchanged one drudgery for another
(which is by no means sure), we are set free for ever from the daily fear
of chastisement. And yet a great change has overtaken us ; and although
we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our pleasure differently.
We need pickles now-a-days to make Wednesday's cold mutton please
our Friday's appetite ; and I can remember the time when to call it red
venison, and tell myself a hunter's story, would have made it more
palatable than the best of sauces. To the grown person, cold mutton is
cold mutton all the world over ; not all the mythology ever invented by
man will make it better or worse to him ; the broad fact, the clamant
reality, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive figments.
But for the child it is still possible to weave an enchantment over
eatables ; and if he has but read of a dish in a story-book, it will be
heavenly manna to him for a week.
If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and exercise, if he
is not something positive in his tastes, it means he has a feeble body and
should have some medicine ; but children may be pure spirits, if they
will, and take their enjoyment in a world of moonshine. Sensation does
not count for so much in our first years as afterwards ; something of the
swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us ; we see and touch and
hear through a sort of golden mist. Children, for instance, are able
enough to see, but they have no great faculty for looking ; they do not
use their eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their
own ; and the things I call to mind seeing most vividly, were not beauti-
ful in themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I thought
they might be turned to practical account in play. Nor is the sense of
touch so clean and poignant in children as it is in a man. If you will turn
over your old memories, I think the sensations of this sort you remem-
ber will be somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt,
general sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of well-