Literature for Children. 5 



mean in our formal use of the word — is not the faculty most 

 early developed. We who are parents often find our children 

 startlingly good reasoners, but that is not the aspect of the 

 mind which stands out in them most prominently. Any one 

 who knows children knows that the affections and the imagina- 

 tion are what chiefly characterize the child nature. " Give a 

 child a little love and you will get a great deal in return," 

 some one has said. Give a child a glimpse into the imagina- 

 tive world, and he will buikl castles and people them, fight 

 battles and win them, create a new world and live in it, far 

 from the madding crowd of life's cares and pain. 



" The supreme endowment of human nature is the gift of 

 imagination," and it is given to the child at the beginning of 

 life. Oftentimes the imagination atrophies for want of use. 

 But it need not have this fate. The poet, the seer, is he who 

 does not let it die, but who, through all his life, looks out 

 upon nature and men with the eyes of a child, seeing not 

 merely what is at the surface, but what is underneath, not 

 merely the hard, apparent reality, but the blessed and more 

 real ideality. 



Many persons, hard and fast realists, grow angry at the 

 suggestion that there is any value in the fancies of childhood 

 and in the power which calls them into being. They would, 

 if they dared, criticise the Creator for mingling this ingre- 

 dient in the human composition, and they seek to eliminate 

 it by denying the child mind its natural food of fairy story 

 and myth, by strapping it about with the intellectual bands 

 of the alphabet and the spelling book and the prosaic primer 

 and arithmetic, much as the Chinese mother of high caste 

 binds and dwarfs the foot of her little baby girl. To the an- 

 nointed eye such realists have the grotesque — the pitiful — 

 hobble of the fine Chinese lady of mature years. But the 

 satisfaction of the imagination and the affections in early life 

 does not mean the crippling and dwarfing of the intellectual 

 powers. They will unfold soon enough. They are simply 

 latent. And when they begin to develop, and after they have 

 grown to maturity, nothing will aid them so much in doing 

 their work as '' the witch, imagination." 



