or “The Corsair,” or “Mazeppa,” or “Manfred,” best loved of that dark group. Perhaps Byron is not considered wholesome reading for little girls in these careful days when expurgated editions of “The Vicar of Wakefield” and “Paul and Virginia” find favor in our nurseries. On this score I have no defense to offer, and I am not proposing the poet as a safe text-book for early youth; but having never been told that there was such a thing as forbidden fruit in literature, I was spared at least that alert curiosity concerning it which is one of the most unpleasant results of our present guarded system. Moreover, we have Goethe’s word for it that Byron is not as immoral as the newspapers, and certainly he is more agreeable reading. I do sincerely believe that if part of his attraction for the young lies in what Mr. Pater calls “the grieved dejection, the endless regret,” which to the undisciplined soul sounds like the true murmur of life, a better part lies in his large grasp of nature,—not nature in her minute and lovely detail, but in her vast outlines, her salient features, her solemn majesty and strength. Crags and misty mountain tops, storm-swept skies and the blue bosom of the restless deep,—these are the aspects of nature that childhood prizes, and loves to hear described in vigorous verse. The pink-tipped daisy, the yellow primrose, and the freckled nest-eggs
“Hatching in the hawthorn-tree”
belong to a late stage of development. Eugénie de Guérin, who recognized as clearly as Sainte-Beuve the “fine penetration” peculiar to children, and who regarded them ever with half-wistful, half-wondering delight, has written some very charming suggestions about the kind of poetry, “pure, fresh, joyous, and delicate,” which she considered proper food for these highly idealized little people,—“angels upon earth.” The only discouraging part of her pretty pleading is her frank admission that—in French literature, at least—there is no such poetry as she describes, which shows how hard it is to conciliate an exclusive theory of excellence. She endeavored sincerely, in her “Infantines,” to remedy this defect, to “speak to childhood in its own language;” and her verses on “Joujou, the Angel of the Playthings,” are quaintly conceived and full of gentle fancies. No child is strongly moved, or taught the enduring delight of song, by such lines as these, but most children will take a genuine pleasure in the baby angel who played with little Abel under the myrtle-trees, who made the first doll and blew the first bubble, and who finds a friend in every tiny boy and girl born into this big gray world. Strange to say, he has his English counterpart in Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Unseen Playmate,” that shadowy companion whose home is the cave dug by childish hands, and who is ready to share all games in the most engaging spirit of accommodation.
“’Tis he, when you play with your soldiers of tin,
That sides with the Frenchmen, and never can win;”
a touch of combative veracity which brings us down at once from Mademoiselle de Guérin’s fancy flights to the real playground, where real children, very faintly resembling “angels upon earth,” are busy with mimic warfare. Mr. Stevenson is one of the few poets whose verses, written especially for the nursery, have found their way straight into little hearts. His charming style, his quick, keen sympathy, and the ease with which he enters into that brilliant world of imagination wherein children habitually dwell, make him their natural friend and minstrel. If some of the rhymes in “A Child’s Garden of Verses” seem a trifle bald and babyish, even these are guiltless of condescension; while others, like “Travel,” “Shadow March,” and “The Land of Story-Books,” are instinct with poetic life. I can only regret that a picture so faultless in detail as “Shadow March,” where we see the crawling darkness peer through the window pane, and hear the beating of the little boy’s heart as he creeps fearfully up the stair, should be marred at its close by a single line of false imagery:—
“All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.”
So fine an artist as Mr. Stevenson must know that shadows do not tramp, and that the recurrence of a short, vigorous word which tells so admirably in Scott’s “William and Helen,” and wherever the effect of sound combined with motion is to be conveyed, is sadly out of place in describing the ghostly things that glide with horrible noiselessness at the feet of the frightened lad. Children, moreover, are keenly alive to the value and the suggestiveness of terms. A little eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, who was reciting “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” stopped short at these lines,—
“Adown the glen rode armed men,