Clouds and water I
learned to delight in, from my occasional lingerings on Battersea bridge,
and yearning westward looks toward the sun setting above rich meadows and
wooded gardens, to me a forbidden El Dorado.
I brought home wild-flowers and chance beetles and butterflies, and pored
over them, not in the spirit of a naturalist, but of a poet. They were to
me God's angels shining in coats of mail and fairy masquerading dresses. I
envied them their beauty, their freedom. At last I made up my mind, in the
simple tenderness of a child's conscience, that it was wrong to rob them of
the liberty for which I pined,--to take them away from the beautiful broad
country whither I longed to follow them; and I used to keep them a day or
two, and then, regretfully, carry them back, and set them loose on the
first opportunity, with many compunctions of heart, when, as generally
happened, they had been starved to death in the mean time.
They were my only recreations after the hours of the small day-school at
the neighbouring chapel, where I learnt to read, write, and sum; except,
now and then, a London walk, with my mother holding my hand tight the whole
way.
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