LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1285, 2 May 1878, Page 3

LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN.

[From the “Athenaeum.”] It is impossible to calculate how enormous in moulding the mind is the power of infant literature. It is not merely that what we read in childhood we never forget, but that it becomes part of our very being. It is this which makes children’s literature so vastly important. Perhaps to write poetry for children is the most difficult of all tasks, as may be seen from the smallness of the number who have succeeded in it. Macaulay said that- “ho who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet must first become a little child,” and, on the other hand, it might almost be said that he who aspires to write poetry for children must be a great poet. Assuredly there is no greater benefactor to the human race than he who succeeds in it. For the proper food of children is not the literature of fact, but “the literature of power,” to use Wordsworth’s distinction. Nourish the child’s mind on the “literature of power,” and the world will take care to fill it and over-fill it with facts. Far more important than the knowledge that William the Conqueror landed in England in 1066 is it to know that between us and the world of mystery and marvels there is only a bean-stalk, or that Prince Dorus’s nose could only bo shortened by listening to the fairy’s teaching. Yet it is the opposite kind of lesson we give to children. In the company of Nature there is nothing more inexplicable than this, that between the adult mind and the mind of childhood there should be an impassable gulf, . . . . If the limitless potentialities of happiness in children are trampled under foot at every turn by a stupid system of so-cAled education —if the very aim of the system is to wash out all the gold and leave the texture of life a prosaic dun—the process is not less fatal to ourselves. For it is the children who are right, and we who are wrong. Our learning is our ignorance. The child’s temper of wonder is the only true temper in which to look out upon the universe. Human life was neither invented in the city nor ordered, in any deep sense, by Mrs Grundy, but is really a magic tapestry, woven of wonders and romance, as the children make it out to be. Yet all this is cruelly trampled upon, and the age cries out, with Mr Grad grind, “ What I want is facts.” As though facts, in themselves, were of any value ; as, though, indeed, there were such things as fact s in any true and absolute sense at all! To us it is, we will confess, a pathetic sight to see a child immersed in the labors in which its days and nights are passed, with its French exercises, its German exercises, its Italian exercises, its Greek exercises, its Latin exercises, its lessons in music, drawing, arithmetic, geography, and all the rest of it, while in every meadow and lane in England its true and only schoolmistress, Nature, is crying out for us to come and read, “Prince Dorus” under the waving trees, through whoso leaves the breeze is playing and the sunlight filtering.