“I nearly disgraced myself”, she wrote, after a visit to Cambridge,[171] “as the company were admiring the front of Emmanuel College, by looking at a tall man stooping to kiss a little child.”
This betrays her attitude to art and life.
If she never understood the “fairy Way of Writing”, it was because she had built a school upon the fairy circles of her village green. Her children were so happy in and about the village that they never discovered an enchanted wood. They planted trees instead of climbing them; they knew all the roads to Market, but nobody showed them the way to Fairyland.
When at last the “reign of fairies” was restored, children burst into an unknown world of adventure and poetry. Ever since that little boy of Shenstone’s suffered for love of St. George, the fairies have fought shy of schools. It remains to be seen whether they will hold their own with modern pedagogues; but they are still in league with the poets, and the understanding between them is this: that the child, once having tasted fairy bread, can spend but half his time upon solid earth. The rest he must have in the Land of Dreams.
CHAPTER IX
THE OLD-FASHIONED GARDEN OF VERSES
The Spectator on Gardens—“Cones, Globes, and Pyramids”—Good counsels in rhyme—Verse in the Schoolroom—Didactic rhymes—Dr. Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs—Puerilia; or, Amusements for the Young; Gammer Gurton’s Garland and Songs for the Nursery—The Sublime Truant—Rules and prescriptions—Original Poems for Infant Minds—The old garden and the new—Jane Taylor’s verses—Poetry for Children, by Charles and Mary Lamb—The Butterfly’s Ball and other festivals—Miss Turner’s cautionary rhymes—“Edward, or Rambling Reasoned on”—The triumph of nonsense and rhythm.
“I think there are as many Kinds of Gardening as of Poetry”, wrote the Spectator. His own garden ran into the “beautiful Wildness of Nature”; he valued it more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly gave them fruit for their songs.[172]
Nature, regarded as a landscape gardener of more than ordinary skill, was even allowed to work under authority in the domain of poetry; but she neglected one corner of it, and there the trees were still clipped after the old fashion into “Cones, Globes, and Pyramids.” This little fenced-off portion was the eighteenth century Child’s Garden of Verses. The only way out of it was by a narrow gate in the midst of a Yew hedge, and of this only good nurses kept the key.
In the lane outside, the pedlar hawked his wares; the old ballads could still be heard, the seven lamps of enchantment burnt bright at nightfall.