To compare these verses with Stevenson’s is to discover an essential difference. The Lambs had the same delight in memories, but they looked back with tenderness to a childhood which they had been forced to leave behind. Stevenson was a boy to the end. The Child in his Garden is heard singing his own deeds. These gentle Olympians looked down at
“Horatio, of ideal courage vain,”
saw him now as Achilles, brandishing his sword, now Hector in a field of slaughtered Greeks, or the Black Prince, driving the enemy before him; but lest vain imagination should grow bold upon encouragement, he must strike his milk-white hand against a nail, and seal the moral with his blood:
“Achilles weeps, Great Hector hangs his head,
And the Black Prince goes whimpering to bed.”
The “Mimic Harlequin” who transforms a whole drawing-room full of furniture into matter of imagination is brought back to reality by his practical mother:
“You’ve put the cat among my work, and torn
A fine lac’d cap that I but once have worn.”
Yet in another rhyme, the monitress relents, and indulging the idle fancies of Robert, allows him, though late for breakfast,
“To sit and watch the vent’rous fly