The wisdom of it is as perceptible to a child as that other lesson of Scott’s, which rings like a clarion:
To all the sensual world proclaim One glorious hour of crowded life Is worth an age without a name.
Then there are his martial pieces, as the ‘[Gathering Song of Donald Dhu]’ and ‘[The Cavalier],’ and there is the inimitable simplicity and sadness of ‘[Proud Maisie],’ like the dirge for Clearista by Meleager, but with a deeper tone, a stronger magic; and there is the song, which the Fates might sing in a Greek chorus, the song which Meg Merrilies sang,
Twist ye, twine ye, even so!
These are but a few examples of Scott’s variety, his spontaneity, his hardly conscious mastery of his art. Like Phemius of Ithaca, he might say ‘none has taught me but myself, and the God has put into my heart all manner of lays’—all but the conscious and elaborate ‘manner of lays,’ which has now such power over some young critics that they talk of Scott’s redeeming his bad verse by his good novels. The taste of childhood and of maturity is simpler and more pure.
In the development of a love of poetry it is probable that simple, natural, and adventurous poetry like Scott’s comes first, and that it is followed later—followed but not superseded—by admiration of such reflective poetry as is plain and even obvious, like that of Longfellow, from whom a number of examples are given. But, to the Editor at least, it seems that a child who cares for poetry is hardly ever too young to delight in mere beauty of words, in the music of metre and rhyme, even when the meaning is perhaps still obscure and little considered. A child, one is convinced, would take great pleasure in Mr. Swinburne’s choruses in ‘Atalanta,’ such as
Before the beginning of years,
and in Shelley’s ‘Cloud’ and his [‘Arethusa].’ For this reason a number of pieces of Edgar Poe’s are given, and we have not shrunk even from including the faulty ‘[Ulalume],’ because of the mere sound of it, apart from the sense. The three most famous poems of Coleridge may be above a child’s full comprehension, but they lead him into a world not realised, ‘an unsubstantial fairy place,’ bright in a morning mist, like our memories of childhood.
It is probably later, in most lives, that the mind wakens to delight in the less obvious magic of style, and the less ringing, the more intimate melody of poets like Keats and Lord Tennyson. The songs of Shakespeare, of course, are for all ages, and the needs of youth comparatively mature are met in Dryden’s ‘[Ode on Alexander’s Feast],’ and in ‘[Lycidas]’ and the ‘Hymn for the Nativity.’
It does not appear to the Editor that poems about children, or especially intended for children, are those which a child likes best. A child’s imaginative life is much spent in the unknown future, and in the romantic past. He is the contemporary of Leonidas, of [Agincourt], of [Bannockburn], of the ‘45; he is living in an heroic age of his own, in a Phæacia where the Gods walk visibly. The poems written for and about children, like Blake’s and some of Wordsworth’s, rather appeal to the old, whose own childhood is now to them a distant fairy world, as the man’s life is to the child. The Editor can remember having been more mystified and puzzled by ‘[Lucy Gray]’ than by the ‘[Eve of St. John],’ at a very early age. He is convinced that Blake’s ‘[Nurse’s Song],’ for example, which brings back to him the long, the endless evenings of the Northern summer, when one had to go to bed while the hills beyond Ettrick were still clear in the silver light, speaks more intimately to the grown man than to the little boy or girl. Hood’s ‘[I remember, I remember],’ in the same way, brings in the burden of reflection on that which the child cannot possibly reflect upon—namely, a childhood which is past. There is the same tone in Mr. Stevenson’s ‘Child’s Garden of Verse,’ which can hardly be read without tears—tears that do not come and should not come to the eyes of childhood. For, beyond the child and his actual experience of the world as the ballads and poems of battle are, he can forecast the years, and anticipate the passions. What he cannot anticipate is his own age, himself, his pleasures and griefs, as the grown man sees them in memory, and with a sympathy for the thing that he has been, and can never be again. It is his excursions into the untravelled world which the child enjoys, and this is what makes Shakespeare so dear to him—Shakespeare who has written so little on childhood. In The Midsummer Night’s Dream the child can lose himself in a world familiar to him, in the fairy age, and can derive such pleasure from Puck, or from Ariel, as his later taste can scarce recover in the same measure. Falstaff is his playfellow, ‘a child’s Falstaff, an innocent creature,’ as Dickens says of Tom Jones in David Copperfield.