fully. There is something of Don Quixote about a baby. He is as comic
as the Knight, but he has also a sublime side.

Do not laugh too much at the hesitations, the countless gropings, the
preposterous follies of this virgin mind, which a butterfly lifts to the
clouds, to which grains of sand are mountains, which understands the
twittering of birds, ascribes thoughts to flowers, and souls to dolls,
which believes in far-off realms, where the trees are sugar, the fields
chocolate, and the rivers syrup, for which Punch and Mother Hubbard are
real and powerful individuals, a mind which peoples silence and vivifies
night. Do not laugh at his love; his life is a dream, and his mistakes
poetry.

This touching poetry which you find in the infancy of man you also find
in the infancy of nations. It is the same. In both cases there is the
same necessity of idealization, the same tendency to personify the
unknown. And it may be said that between Punch and Jupiter, Mother
Hubbard and Venus, there is only a hair's breadth.




CHAPTER XXIX

HIS FIRST BREECHES

The great desire in a child is to become a man. But the first symptom of
virility, the first serious step taken in life, is marked by the
assumption of breeches.