“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,”—
should be sufficient to undeceive him forever. The spell of those finely chosen words lies in the shadowy and half-seen picture they convey,—a picture with indistinct outlines, as of an unknown land, where the desolate spirit wanders moaning in the gloom. The whole poem is inexpressibly alluring to an imaginative child, and its atmosphere of bleak despondency darkens suddenly into horror at the breaking off of the last line from visions of the grave and of peaceful death,—
“I hear the roaring of the sea,
Oriana.”
The same grace of indistinctness, though linked with a gentler mood and with a softer music, makes the lullaby in “The Princess” a lasting delight to children, while the pretty cradle-song in “Sea Dreams,” beginning,—
“What does little birdie say
In her nest at peep of day?”
has never won their hearts. Its motive is too apparent, its nursery flavor too pronounced. It has none of the condescension of “Minnie and Winnie,” and grown people can read it with pleasure; but a simple statement of obvious truths, or a simple line of obvious reasoning, however dexterously narrated in prose or verse, has not the art to hold a youthful soul in thrall.
If it be a matter of interest to know what poets are most dear to the children around us, to the ordinary “apple-eating” little boys and girls for whom we are hardly brave enough to predict a shining future, it is delightful to be told by favorite authors and by well-loved men of letters what poets first bewitched their ardent infant minds. It is especially pleasant to have Mr. Andrew Lang admit us a little way into his confidence, and confess to us that he disliked “Tam O’Shanter” when his father read it aloud to him; preferring, very sensibly, “to take my warlocks and bogies with great seriousness.” Of course he did, and the sympathies of all children are with him in his choice. The ghastly details of that witches’ Sabbath are far beyond a child’s limited knowledge of demonology and the Scotch dialect. Tam’s escape and Maggie’s final catastrophe seem like insults offered to the powers of darkness; only the humor of the situation is apparent, and humor is seldom, to the childish mind, a desirable element of poetry. Not all the spirit of Caldecott’s illustrations can make “John Gilpin” a real favorite in our nurseries, while “The Jackdaw of Rheims” is popular simply because children, being proof against cynicism, accept the story as it is told, with much misplaced sympathy for the thievish bird, and many secret rejoicings over his restoration to grace and feathers. As for “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” its humor is swallowed up in tragedy, and the terror of what is to come helps little readers over such sad stumbling-blocks as
“So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,