A Means of After-Solace and Refreshment

It would be difficult to overrate this habit of seeing and storing as a means of after-solace and refreshment.  The busiest of us have holidays when we slip our necks out of the yoke and come face to face with Nature, to be healed and blessed by –

The silence and the calm
“The breathing balm,
Of mute, insensate things.”[1]

This immediate refreshment is open to everybody according to his measure; but it is a mistake to suppose that everybody is able to carry away a refreshing image of that which gives him delight.  Only a few can say with Wordsworth, of scenes they have visited –

"Though absent long, 
These forms of beauty have not been to me, 
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: 
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns in cities, I have owed to them, 
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, 
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration."[2] ,

And yet this is not high poetic gift which the rest of us must be content to admire, but a common reward for taking pains in the act of seeing which parents may do a great deal to confer upon their children.

The mother must beware how she spoils the simplicity, the objective character of the child’s enjoyment, by treating his little descriptions as feats of cleverness to be repeated to his father or to visitors; she had better make a vow to suppress herself, ‘to say nothing to nobody,’ in his presence at any rate, though the child should show himself a born poet.