The sea, like all very large things, can only be intimately understood by children.  If we can conceive a sensible grown-up person looking at the sea for the first time, we feel that he should either yawn or wish to drown himself.  But a child would take a sample of it in a bucket, and consider that in all its aspects; and then it would know that the sea is a great many bucketfuls of water, and further that by an odd freak of destiny this water is not fit to drink.  Storms and ships and sand-castles and lighthouses and all the other side-shows would follow later; but in the meantime the child would have seen the sea in a bucket, as it had previously seen the moon in a looking-glass, so would know all about it.  The moon is a variable and interesting kind of lamp; the sea is buckets and buckets and buckets full p. 131of water.  I think the stars are holes in a sort of black curtain or ceiling, and the sun is a piece of brightness, except at sunset or in a mist, when it is a whole Dutch cheese.  The world is streets and fields and the seaside and our house.

I doubt whether a child has any sense of what I may call the appeal of breadth.  If it is confronted with a fine view, it will concentrate its interest on a windmill or a doll’s house, and the seaside is no more than a place where one wears no shoes or stockings, and the manufacture of mud pies becomes suddenly licit.  The child does not share the torments of the adult Londoner, who feels that there is no room in the world to stretch his arms and legs, and therefore wins a pathetic sense of freedom in seeing the long yellow sands and the green wastes of the sea.  Nor is it at all excited by the consideration that there is a lot more sea beyond the horizon; the extent of its interest in the water is the limit to which it may paddle.

Yet in some dim, strange way the child realises ?sthetic values more here than elsewhere.  I am quite sure it can see no real p. 132beauty in its normal surroundings.  Sunsets and small houses lit for evening, the shining streets after rain, and even flowers and pictures and dolls, are never beautiful to a child in the sense that a story or an idea may be beautiful.   But tacitly, for a child has no language to express such things, something of the blueness of the sea seems to seek expression in its eyes, something of the sparkle of the sand seems to be tangled in its hair, something of the sunshine burns in its rounded calves that glow like brown eggs.  A child is always a thing of wonder.  But on the edge of the sea this wonder deepens until the artificial observer is abashed.  A seaside child is no creature to be petted and laughed over; it were as easy to pet the tireless waters, and to laugh over the grave of a little cat; children whom one has known very well indeed in town will find new playing fields by the sea into which it is impossible to follow them.  Dorothy weighs five stone four pounds at Maida Vale; at Littlehampton the sea wind blows her along like a feather; she is become a wispy, spiritual thing, a p. 133faint, fair creature a-dance on light feet that would make the fairy-girl of a poet’s dream seem clumsy by comparison.  She is nearer to us when she paddles.  The warm sand creeping up through her toes, the silver thread of coolness about her legs, these things are within our comprehension though they fall no more within our experience.  But wh............