Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    slightly bird-like form, and of its fluttering movement.1 Pretty conceits are often resorted to in this assimilation of the new and strange to the familiar, as when a child seeing dew on the grass said, ‘ The grass is crying,’ or when stars were described as “ cinders from God’s stove,” and butterflies as “ pansies flying ”.2 Other examples of this picturesque mode of childish apperception will meet us below. This play of imagination in connexion with apprehend¬ ing objects of sense has a strong vitalising or personify¬ ing element. That is to say, the child sees what we regard as lifeless and soulless as alive and conscious. Thus he gives not only body but soul to the wind when it whistles or howls at night. The most unpromising things come in for this warming vitalising touch of the child’s fancy. He will make something like a personality out of a letter. Thus one little fellow aged one year eight months conceived a special fondness for the letter W, addressing it thus : ‘ Dear old boy W Another little boy well on in his fourth year, when tracing a letter L happened to slip so that the horizontal limb formed an angle thus, U. He instantly saw the resemblance to the sedentary human form and said : “ Oh, he’s sitting down Similarly when he made an F turn the wrong way and then put the correct form to the left thus, Fd, he exclaimed : “ They’re talking together Sometimes this endowment of things with feeling leads to a quaint manifestation of sympathy. Miss Ingelow writes of herself: When a little over two years old, and for about a year after “ I had a habit of attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, the same amount and kind of intelligence that 1 had myself, but even to stones and manufactured articles. I used to feel 1 The references to the child C. are to the subject of the memoir given below, chap. xi. 2 W. H. Burnham, be. cit., p. 212 £
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