And the deer live safe in the breezy brake,
And timid, funny, pert little bunny
Winks his nose, and sits all sunny.
Christina Rossetti.
Now, in comparing this poem with some of the doggerel verse offered to small children, one is struck with the literary superiority in the choice of words. Here, in spite of the simplicity of the poem, there is not the ordinary limited vocabulary, nor the forced rhyme, nor the application of a moral, by which the artist falls from grace.
Again, in Eugene Field's “Hushaby Lady,” the language of which is most simple, the child is carried away by the beauty of the sound.
I remember hearing some poetry repeated by the children in one of the elementary schools in Sheffield which made me feel that they had realised romantic possibilities which would prevent their lives from ever becoming quite prosaic again, and I wish that this practice were more usual. There is little difficulty with the children. I can remember, in my own experience as a teacher in London, making the experiment of reading or repeating passages from Milton and Shakespeare to children from nine to eleven years of age, and the enthusiastic way they responded by learning those passages by heart. I have taken, with several sets of children, such passages from Milton as “Echo Song,” “Sabrina,” “By the rushy fringed Bank,” “Back, shepherds, back,” from Comus, “May Morning,” “Ode to Shakespeare,” “Samson on his blindness,” etc. I even ventured on several passages from Paradise Lost, and found “Now came still evening on” a particular favourite with the children.
It seemed even easier to interest them in Shakespeare, and they learned quite readily and easily many passages from “As You Like It,” “Merchant of Venice,” “Julius Cæsar”; from “Richard II,” “Henry IV,” and “Henry V.”
The method I should recommend in the introduction of both poets occasionally into the Story-hour would be threefold.
First, to choose passages which appeal for beauty of sound or beauty of mental vision called up by those sounds: such as, “Tell me where is Fancy bred,” Titania's Lullaby, “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.”