The United States was young and strong, and in natural reaction reading books for children, as well as volumes of selections for older folk, contained many articles about death. In the Sixth Reader was the gruesome tale of Ginevra, who in sport hid in a great chest on her wedding day and was suffocated therein, her body not being found till many years afterwards; there was the “Death of Little Nell,” “Over the River,” “The Conqueror’s Grave,” the “Burial of Sir John Moore,” the story of the Indian who was swept over Niagara Falls, and an especially vivid account of the horrors of the French Revolution. Against all the theories of pedagogy, such thoughts as these were chosen to put into youthful minds—and did them not one bit of harm. The country was all a-thrill with energy, and here in the children’s reader was much of meditative prose and poetry, “The Old Clock on the Stair,” the “Address to a Mummy,” Byron’s “Apostrophe to the Ocean,” Collins’s “Ode to the Passions,” and Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”—and the strange part of it all was that the children actually enjoyed these serious writings.
No one, least of all the children themselves, ever demanded entertaining stories in the reading class or a frequent change of readers any more than they demanded interesting examples in arithmetic or a change in the spelling of words or in the multiplication table. The same selections were read over and over, but no one seemed bored by the repetition. The secret was that when the reader was taken in hand, no one expected to be amused. Every one realized that there was some definite work to do. What the author meant must be discovered. Then one after another was called on to read the same paragraph or stanza until the teacher was satisfied that the thought had been fully brought out. The selections in the reader were carefully chosen to give scope to thought and expression. To read well was regarded as an accomplishment. The best reader in the room was looked upon with envy and admiration. Visitors often asked if they might hear a class in reading.
As has been said, when the reader was taken in hand, every one in the class realized that there was work to be done; but of course not all succeeded equally well in doing it. One pupil declared his belief that a “storied urn” meant an urn “that you could tell a lot of stories about.” Another demanded with emphasis,
“And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odes?”
and yet another, coming to
“Yet my last thought is England’s—fly!
To Dacre bear my signet ring,”
read in defiance of both sense and punctuation,
“Yet my last thought is England’s fly.”