Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verse is another storehouse of treasure for mothers. Some of his rhymes, such as “Good and Bad Children,” are quite equal to Mother Goose in their good advice administered in quaintly merry form, while his “Foreign Lands” and “My Shadow” teach children to idealize the everyday happenings of the home life.
How could a mother better remind her small boy or girl that it is time to waken than by repeating his lines:
A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon the window-sill,
Cocked his shining eye and said:
“Ain’t you ’shamed, you sleepy-head!”
When a mother habitually repeats to her child stories and verses of the character outlined, she is not only forming his taste in literature along right lines, but she is helping to enlarge his vocabulary.
“What does ‘embark’ mean, Mamma?” is sure to follow the first or second recital of Stevenson’s “My Bed Is a Boat”:
My bed is like a little boat;
Nurse helps me in when I embark;