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'; -
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 graphicversion of the famous Psalm, 'The Lord is my

shepherd': and from the places employed in its illustration, which
are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a house then occupied by my

father, I am able, to date it before the seventh year of my age,
although it was probably earlier in fact. The 'pastures green' were

represented by a certain suburban stubble-field, where I had once
walked with my nurse, under an autumnal sunset, on the banks of the

Water of Leith: the place is long ago built up; no pastures now, no
stubble-fields; only a maze of little streets and smoking chimneys

and shrill children. Here, in the fleecy person of a sheep, I seemed
to myself to follow something unseen, unrealised, and yet benignant;

and close by the sheep in which I was incarnated - as if for greater
security - rustled the skirt, of my nurse. 'Death's dark vale' was a

certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery: a formidable yet beloved
spot, for children love to be afraid, - in measure as they love all

experience of vitality. Here I beheld myself some paces ahead
(seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny

passage; on the one side of me a rude, knobby, shepherd's staff, such
as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like a

billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress; the stiff sturdily
upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like one

whispering, towards my ear. I was aware - I will never tell you how
- that the presence of these articles afforded me encouragement. The

third and last of my pictures illustrated words:-
'My table Thou hast furnished

In presence of my foes:
My head Thou dost with oil anoint,

And my cup overflows':
and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series. I saw

myself seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over my
shoulder a hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from an

authentic shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green court of
a ruin, and from the far side of the court black and white imps

discharged against me ineffectual arrows. The picture appears
arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock

analysed the dream of Alan Armadale. The summer-house and court were
muddled together out of Billings' ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND; the imps

conveyed from Bagster's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS; the bearded and robed
figure from any one of the thousand Bible pictures; and the shoe-horn

was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, where it figured in
the hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed out to me as

a jest by my father. It was shown me for a jest, remark; but the
serious spirit of infancy adopted it in earnest. Children are all

classics; a bottle would have seemed an intermediary too trivial -
that divinerefreshment of whose meaning I had no guess; and I seized

on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn with delight, even as, a little
later, I should have written flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or any

word that might have appealed to me at the moment as least
contaminate with mean associations. In this string of pictures I

believe the gist of the psalm to have consisted; I believe it had no
more to say to me; and the result was consolatory. I would go to

sleep dwelling with restfulness upon these images; they passed before
me, besides, to an appropriate music; for I had already singled out

from that rude psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in the minds
of all, not growing old, not disgraced by its association with long

Sunday tasks, a scarceconscious joy in childhood, in age a companion
thought:-

'In pastures green Thou leadest me,
The quiet waters by.'

The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of
what was read to me, and not of any manner in the words. If these

pleased me it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great
vacant world upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots

that I might re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances
that I might call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of

Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in
which I lay so long in durance. ROBINSON CRUSOE; some of the books

of that cheerful, ingenious, romantic soul, Mayne Reid; and a work
rather gruesome and bloody for a child, but very picturesque, called

PAUL BLAKE; these are the three strongest impressions I remember:
THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON came next, LONGO INTERVALLO. At these I

played, conjured up their scenes, and delighted to hear them
rehearsed unto seventy times seven. I am not sure but what PAUL

BLAKE came after I could read. It seems connected with a visit to
the country, and an experience unforgettable. The day had been warm;

H- and I had played together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness
across the road; then came the evening with a great flash of colour

and a heavenlysweetness in the air. Somehow my play-mate had
vanished, or is out of the story, as the sages say, but I was sent

into the village on an errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales,
went down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. How often

since then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the
first time: the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot,

and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall, for it was then
that I knew I loved reading.

II
To pass from hearingliterature to reading it is to take a great and

dangerous step. With not a few, I think a large proportion of their
pleasure then comes to an end; 'the malady of not marking' overtakes

them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again
the chime of fair words or the march of the stately period. NON

RAGIONIAM of these. But to all the step is dangerous; it involves
coming of age; it is even a kind of second weaning. In the past all

was at the choice of others; they chose, they digested, they read
aloud for us and sang to their own tune the books of childhood. In

the future we are to approach the silent, inexpressive type alone,
like pioneers; and the choice of what we are to read is in our own

hands thenceforward. For instance, in the passages already adduced,
I detect and applaud the ear of my old nurse; they were of her

choice, and she imposed them on my infancy, reading the works of
others as a poet would scarce dare to read his own; gloating on the

rhythm, dwelling with delight on assonances and alliterations. I
know very well my mother must have been all the while trying to

educate my taste upon more secular authors; but the vigour and the
continual opportunities of my nurse triumphed, and after a long

search, I can find in these earliest volumes of my autobiography no
mention of anything but nursery rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne.

I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their
school Readers. We might not now find so much pathos in 'Bingen on

the Rhine,' 'A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,' or in