Most Grown Men lose the Habit of Observation

Thus, we owe something to Mr Evans for taking his little daughter Mary Anne* with him on his long business drives among the pleasant Warwickshire lanes; the little girl stood up between her father’s knees, seeing much and saying little; and the outcome was the scenes of rural life in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss.  Wordsworth, reared amongst the mountains, becomes a very prophet of Nature; while Tennyson draws endless imagery from the levels of the eastern counties where he was brought up.  Little David Copperfield was “a very observant child, though,” says he, “I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy.  Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood”[1]; — in which remark Dickens makes his hero talk sound philosophy as well as kindly sense.