One might occasionally introduce one of Edward Lear's "Nonsense Rhymes." For instance:
There was an Old Man of Cape Horn
Who wished he had never been born.
So he sat in a chair
Till he died of despair,
That dolorous Old Man of Cape Horn.
Now, except in case of very young children, this could not possibly be taken seriously. The least observant normal boy or girl would recognize the hollowness of the pessimism that prevents an old man from at least an attempt to rise from his chair.
The following I have chosen as repeated with intense appreciation and much dramatic vigor by a little boy just five years old:
There was an old man who said: "Hush!
I perceive a young bird in that bush."
When they said: "Is it small?"
He replied, "Not at all.
It is four times as large as the bush."[29]
One of the most desirable of all elements to introduce into our stories is that which encourages kinship with animals. With very young children this is easy, because during those early years when the mind is not clogged with knowledge, the sympathetic imagination enables them to enter into the feeling of animals. Andersen has an illustration of this point in his "Ice Maiden":
"Children who cannot talk yet can understand the language of fowls and ducks quite well, and cats and dogs speak to them quite as plainly as Father and Mother; but that is only when the children are very small, and then even Grandpapa's stick will become a perfect horse to them that can neigh and, in their eyes, is furnished with legs and a tail. With some children this period ends later than with others, and of such we are accustomed to say that they are very backward, and that they have remained children for a long time. People are in the habit of saying strange things."
Felix Adler says:
"Perhaps the chief attraction of fairy tales is due to their representing the child as living in brotherly friendship with nature and all creatures. Trees, flowers, animals, wild and tame, even the stars are represented as comrades of children. That animals are only human beings in disguise is an axiom in the fairy tales. Animals are humanized, that is, the kinship between animal and human life is still keenly felt, and this reminds us of those early animistic interpretations of nature which subsequently led to doctrines of metempsychosis."[30]
I think that beyond question the finest animal stories are to be found in the Indian collections, of which I furnish a list in the last chapter.