His waking is full of sleep, yet his very being is enough for
him.
But all the time his mother lives in the hope of his growth. In the
present babe, her heart broods over the coming boy--the unknown marvel
closed in the visible germ. Let mothers lament as they will over the
change from childhood to maturity, which of them would not grow weary of
nursing for ever a child in whom no live law of growth kept unfolding an
infinite change! The child knows nothing of growth--desires none--but
grows. Within him is the force of a power he can no more resist than the
peach can refuse to swell and grow ruddy in the sun. By slow,
inappreciable, indivisible accretion and outfolding, he is lifted,
floated, drifted on towards the face of the awful mirror in which he
must encounter his first foe--must front himself.
By degrees he has learned that the world is around, and not within
him--that he is apart, and that is apart; from consciousness he passes
to self-consciousness. This is a second birth, for now a higher life
begins. When a man not only lives, but knows that he lives, then first
the possibility of a real life commences. By _real life_, I mean life
which has a share in its own existence.
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