Another poet has written, speaking of the chalk hills:--
Only a little while remain
The Downs in their solemnity.
Nor is this saying forced. Men and women cannot attach themselves even to
the hills where they first played.
Some men, wise but unillumined, and not conscious of that light which I
here physically see shining all round and through you in the picture which
is before my eyes as I write, have said that to die young and to end the
business early was a great blessing. We do not know. But we do know that
to die long after and to have gone through the business must be blessed,
since blessedness and holiness and sacredness are bound together in one.
But, of these three, be certain that sacredness is your chief business,
blessedness after your first childhood you will never know, and holiness
you may only see as men see distant mountains lifted beyond a plain; it
cannot be your habitation. Sacredness, which is the mark of that purpose
whose heir is blessedness, whose end is holiness, will be upon you until
you die; maintain it, and let it be your chief concern, for though you
neglect it, it will remain and avenge itself.
All this I have seen in your picture as you go across the grass, and it
was an accident of the camera that did it. If any one shall say these
things do not attach to the portrait of a child, let him ask himself
whether they do not attach to the portrait that might be drawn, did human
skill suffice, of the life of a woman or a man which springs from the
demeanour of childhood; or let him ask himself whether, if a face in old
age and that same face in childhood were equally and as by a revelation
set down each in its full truth, and the growth of the one into the other
were interpreted by a profound intelligence, what I have said would not
be true of all that little passage of ours through the daylight.
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