This is why the years of childhood are like a long poem.  For the function of poetry, as of all art, is to grasp the Idea—­in the Platonic sense; in other words, to apprehend a particular object in such a way as to perceive its essential nature, the characteristics it has in common with all other objects of the same kind; so that a single object appears as the representative of a class, and the results of one experience hold good for a thousand.

It may be thought that my remarks are opposed to fact, and that the child is never occupied with anything beyond the individual objects or events which are presented to it from time to time, and then only in so far as they interest and excite its will for the moment; but this is not really the case.  In those early years, life—­in the full meaning of the word, is something so new and fresh, and its sensations are so keen and unblunted by repetition, that, in the midst of all its pursuits and without any clear consciousness of what it is doing, the child is always silently occupied in grasping the nature of life itself,—­in arriving at its fundamental character and general outline by means of separate scenes and experiences; or, to use Spinoza’s phraseology, the child is learning to see the things and persons about it sub specie aeternitatis,—­as particular manifestations of universal law.

The younger we are, then, the more does every individual object represent for us the whole class to which it belongs; but as the years increase, this becomes less and less the case.  That is the reason why youthful impressions are so different from those of old age.  And that it also why the slight knowledge and experience gained in childhood and youth afterwards come to stand as the permanent rubric, or heading, for all the knowledge acquired in later life,—­those early forms of knowledge passing into categories, as it were, under which the results of subsequent experience are classified; though a clear consciousness of what is being done, does not always attend upon the process.

In this way the earliest years of a man’s life lay the foundation of his view of the world, whether it be shallow or deep; and although this view may be extended and perfected later on, it is not materially altered.  It is an effect of this purely objective and therefore poetical view of the world,—­essential to the period of childhood and promoted by the as yet undeveloped state of the volitional energy—­that, as children, we are concerned much more with the acquisition of pure knowledge than with exercising the power of will.  Hence that grave, fixed look observable in so many children, of which Raphael makes such a happy use in his depiction of cherubs, especially in the picture of the Sistine Madonna.  The years of childhood are thus rendered so full of bliss that the memory of them is always coupled with longing and regret.