“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
These are the sweet, mysterious echoes of true fairyland, where Shakespeare and little children wander at their will.
Poems of the third class are intended for growing girls and boys, and aspire to be considered literature. They are well written, as a rule, with a smooth fluency that seems to be the distinguishing gift of our minor verse-makers, who, even when they have least to say, say it with unbroken sweetness and grace. This pretty, easy insignificance is much better adapted to adult readers, who demand little of poets beyond brevity, than to children, who love large issues, real passions, fine emotions, and an heroic attitude in life. Pleasant thoughts couched in pleasant language, trivial details, and photographic bits of description make no lasting appeal to the expansive imagination of a child. Analysis is wasted upon him altogether, because he sees things swiftly, and sees them as a whole. He may disregard fine shading and minute merits, but there are no boundaries to his wandering vision. “Small sciences are the labors of our manhood, but the round universe is the plaything of the boy.”
The painful lack of distinction in most of the poetry prepared especially for him chills his fine ardor and dulls his imagination. Subtle verses about moods and tempers, calculated to make healthy little readers emulate Miss Martineau’s peevish self-sympathy; melancholy verses about young children who suffer poverty and disaster; weird and unintelligible verses, with all Poe’s indistinctness and none of his music; commonplace verses about bootblacks and newsboys; descriptive verses about snowstorms and April showers; pious verses about infant prigs;—verses of every kind, all on the same level of agreeable mediocrity, and all warranted to be so harmless that a baby could hear them without blushing. Why, the child who reads “Young Lochinvar” is richer in that one good and gallant poem than the child who has all these modern substitutes heaped yearly at his foolish feet.
For the question at issue is not what kind of poetry is wholesome for children, but what kind of poetry do children love. In nineteen cases out of twenty, that which they love is good for them, and they can guide themselves a great deal better than we can hope to guide them. I once asked a friend who had spent many years in teaching little girls and boys whether her small pupils, when left to their own discretion, ever chose any of the pretty, trivial verses out of new books and magazines for study and recitation. She answered, Never. They turned instinctively to the same old favorites she had been listening to so long; to the same familiar poems that their fathers and mothers had probably studied and recited before them. “Hohenlinden,” “Glenara,” “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” “Young Lochinvar,” “Rosabelle,” “To Lucasta, on going to the Wars,” the lullaby from “The Princess,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” “Annabel Lee,” Longfellow’s translation of “The Castle by the Sea,” and “The Skeleton in Armor,”—these are the themes of which children never weary; these are the songs that are sung forever in their secret Paradise of Delights. The little volumes containing such tried and proven friends grow shabby with much handling; and I have seen them marked all over with mysterious crosses and dots and stars, each of which denoted the exact degree of affection which the child bore to the poem thus honored and approved. I can fancy Mr. Lang’s “Blue Poetry Book” fairly covered with such badges of distinction; for never before has any selection of poems appealed so clearly and insistently to childish tastes and hearts. When I turn over its pages, I feel as if the children of England must have brought their favorite songs to Mr. Lang, and prayed, each one, that his own darling might be admitted,—as if they must have forced his choice into their chosen channels. Its only rival in the field, Palgrave’s “Children’s Treasury of English Song,” is edited with such nice discrimination, such critical reserve, that it is well-nigh flawless,—a triumph of delicacy and good taste. But much that childhood loves is necessarily excluded from a volume so small and so carefully considered. The older poets, it is true, are generously treated,—Herrick, especially, makes a braver show than he does in Mr. Lang’s collection; and there are plenty of beautiful ballads, some of which, like “The Lass of Lochroyan,” we miss sorely from the pages of the “Blue Poetry Book.” On the other hand, where, in Mr. Palgrave’s “Treasury,” are those lovely snatches of song familiar to our earliest years, and which we welcome individually with a thrill of pleasure, as Mr. Lang shows them to us once more?—“Rose Aylmer,” “County Guy,” “Proud Maisie,” “How Sleep the Brave,” “Nora’s Vow,”—the delight of my own childhood,—the pathetic “Farewell,”—