LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN.* 



Prop. E. S. Parsons. 



What children are meant by our subject? Though the 

 honor of speaking in this presence has been given me by you 

 who are kindergarten teachers, I have not interpreted your 

 request as limiting me to the discussion of literature suited 

 to children of the kindergarten age. If I had so interpreted 

 it, I should have been, compelled at once to decline the invita- 

 tion, for I feel myself wholly unqualified to speak upon a sub- 

 ject requiring technical knowledge and experience of a sort 

 which I do not possess. I shall try to unfold the thought of 

 literature for children of all ages, those who are just able to 

 understand what is read to them, and every grade up to that 

 which has just crossed the invisible line beyond which is youth. 

 Five and sixteen are good theoretical limits. 



What is literature? A second question more important 

 than the first. We ought to resent the loose use of the term, 

 for it has a definite meaning, and one which ought to be kept 

 sacred. All writing is not literature. Intellect cannot make 

 literature; so writing that seeks simply to inform, to instruct, 

 is not literature. Into writing which can be called by this 

 high name, intellect will enter, but it must be intellect, aerated 

 by imagination, to use Lowell's favorite phrase. The wind of 

 the spirit must blow through the essay or the poem if it is to 

 win the right to be called literature. And this quality of im- 

 agination must have given to the writing an emoti(>nal and an 

 artistic value, the two being closely linked together, before it 

 can take its place in the list of the immortals. Imagination 

 and feeling, then, are the final tests of literature: imagination, 

 which apprehends the deeper significance of life and embodies 

 it in forms of beauty, and feeling, which is the response of the 

 soul to the vision. 



*An address delivered before the twenty-second autiual sossion of the Colorado 

 Teachers' Association. 



