“Oh, bumble bee!
Bumble bee!
Don’t fly so near!
Or you will tumble me
Over, I fear.”
“Oh, funny elf!
Funny elf!
Don’t be alarmed!
I am looking for honey, elf;
You sha’n’t be harmed.”
“Then tarry,
Oh, tarry, bee!
Fill up your sack;
And carry, oh, carry me
Home on your back.”[1]
Footnote 1:
Oliver Herford in _St. Nicholas_.
Now what child will read more than once these empty little verses (very
prettily illustrated) when it is in his power to turn back to other
sprites that sing in different strains,—to the fairy who wanders
“Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough briar,”
seeking pearl eardrops for the cowslips’ ears; or to that softer shape,
the music of whose song, once heard, haunts us forever:—
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
These are the sweet, mysterious echoes of true fairyland, where
Shakespeare and little children wander at their will.
Poems of the third class are intended for growing girls and boys, and
aspire to be considered literature. They are well written, as a rule,
with a smooth fluency that seems to be the distinguishing gift of our
minor verse-makers, who, even when they have least to say, say it with
unbroken sweetness and grace. This pretty, easy insignificance is much
better adapted to adult readers, who demand little of poets beyond
brevity, than to children, who love large issues, real passions, fine
emotions, and an heroic attitude in life. Pleasant thoughts couched in
pleasant language, trivial details, and photographic bits of description
make no lasting appeal to the expansive imagination of a child. Analysis
is wasted upon him altogether, because he sees things swiftly, and sees
them as a whole. He may disregard fine shading and minute merits, but
there are no boundaries to his wandering vision. “Small sciences are the
labors of our manhood, but the round universe is the plaything of the
boy.”
The painful lack of distinction in most of the poetry prepared
especially for him chills his fine ardor and dulls his imagination.
Subtle verses about moods and tempers, calculated to make healthy little
readers emulate Miss Martineau’s peevish self-sympathy; melancholy
verses about young children who suffer poverty and disaster; weird and
unintelligible verses, with all Poe’s indistinctness and none of his
music; commonplace verses about bootblacks and newsboys; descriptive
verses about snowstorms and April showers; pious verses about infant
prigs;—verses of every kind, all on the same level of agreeable
mediocrity, and all warranted to be so harmless that a baby could hear
them without blushing. Why, the child who reads “Young Lochinvar” is
richer in that one good and gallant poem than the child who has all
these modern substitutes heaped yearly at his foolish feet.
For the question at issue is not what kind of poetry is wholesome for
children, but what kind of poetry do children love. In nineteen cases
out of twenty, that which they love is good for them, and they can guide
themselves a great deal better than we can hope to guide them. I once
asked a friend who had spent many years in teaching little girls and
boys whether her small pupils, when left to their own discretion, ever
chose any of the pretty, trivial verses out of new books and magazines
for study and recitation. She answered, Never. They turned instinctively
to the same old favorites she had been listening to so long; to the same
familiar poems that their fathers and mothers had probably studied and
recited before them. “Hohenlinden,” “Glenara,” “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,”
“Young Lochinvar,” “Rosabelle,” “To Lucasta, on going to the Wars,” the
lullaby from “The Princess,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” “Annabel Lee,”
Longfellow’s translation of “The Castle by the Sea,” and “The Skeleton
in Armor,”—these are the themes of which children never weary; these are
the songs that are sung forever in their secret Paradise of Delights.
The little volumes containing such tried and proven friends grow shabby
with much handling; and I have seen them marked all over with mysterious
crosses and dots and stars, each of which denoted the exact degree of
affection which the child bore to the poem thus honored and approved. I
can fancy Mr. Lang’s “Blue Poetry Book” fairly covered with such badges
of distinction; for never before has any selection of poems appealed so
clearly and insistently to childish tastes and hearts. When I turn over
its pages, I feel as if the children of England must have brought their
favorite songs to Mr. Lang, and prayed, each one, that his own darling
might be admitted,—as if they must have forced his choice into their
chosen channels. Its only rival in the field, Palgrave’s “Children’s
Treasury of English Song,” is edited with such nice discrimination, such
critical reserve, that it is well-nigh flawless,—a triumph of delicacy
and good taste. But much that childhood loves is necessarily excluded
from a volume so small and so carefully considered. The older poets, it
is true, are generously treated,—Herrick, especially, makes a braver
show than he does in Mr. Lang’s collection; and there are plenty of
beautiful ballads, some of which, like “The Lass of Lochroyan,” we miss
sorely from the pages of the “Blue Poetry Book.” On the other hand,
where, in Mr. Palgrave’s “Treasury,” are those lovely snatches of song
familiar to our earliest years, and which we welcome individually with a
thrill of pleasure, as Mr. Lang shows them to us once more?—“Rose
Aylmer,” “County Guy,” “Proud Maisie,” “How Sleep the Brave,” “Nora’s
Vow,”—the delight of my own childhood,—the pathetic “Farewell,”—
“It was a’ for our rightfu’ King,
We left fair Scotland’s strand;
It was a’ for our rightfu’ King,
We e’er saw Irish land,”—
and Hood’s silvery little verses beginning,—
“A lake and a fairy boat
To sail in the moonlight clear,—
And merrily we would float
From the dragons that watch us here!”
All these and many more are gathered safely into this charming volume.
Nothing we long to see appears to be left out, except, indeed, Waller’s
“Go, Lovely Rose,” and Herrick’s “Night Piece,” both of them very
serious omissions. It seems strange to find seven of Edgar Poe’s poems
in a collection which excludes the “Night Piece,” so true a favorite
with all girl children, and a favorite that, once rightfully
established, can never be thrust from our affections. As for Praed’s
“Red Fisherman,” Mr. Lang has somewhere recorded his liking for this
“sombre” tale, which, I think, embodies everything that a child ought
not to love. It is the only poem in the book that I wish elsewhere; but
perhaps this is a perverse prejudice on my part. There may be little
readers to whom its savage cynicism and gloom carry a pleasing terror,
like that which oppressed my infant soul as I lingered with Goodman
Brown in the awful witch-haunted forest where Hawthorne has shown us the
triumph of evil things. “It is his excursions into the unknown world
which the child enjoys,” says Mr. Lang; and how shall we set a limit to
his wanderings! He journeys far with careless, secure footsteps; and for
him the stars sing in their spheres, and fairies dance in the moonlight,
and the hoarse clashing of arms rings bravely from hard-won fields, and
lovers fly together under the stormy skies. He rides with Lochinvar, and
sails with Sir Patrick Spens into the northern seas, and chases the red
deer with Allen-a-Dale, and stands by Marmion’s side in the thick of the
ghastly fray. He has given his heart to Helen of Troy, and to the Maid
of Saragossa, and to the pale child who met her death on the cruel
Gordon spears, and to the lady with yellow hair who knelt moaning by
Barthram’s bier. His friends are bold Robin Hood, and Lancelot du Lac,
and the white-plumed Henry of Navarre, and the princely scapegrace who
robbed the robbers to make “laughter for a month, and a good jest
forever.” A lordly company these, and seldom to be found in the gray
walks of middle age. Robin Hood dwells not on the Stock Exchange, and
Prince Hal dare not show his laughing face before societies for leveling
thrones and reorganizing the universe. We adults pass our days, alas, in
the Town of Stupidity,—abhorred of Bunyan’s soul,—and our companions are
Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. Despondency, and Mr. Want-wit, still
scrubbing his Ethiopian, and Mr. Feeble-mind, and the “deplorable young
woman named Dull.” But it is better to be young, and to see the golden
light of romance in the skies, and to kiss the white feet of Helen, as
she stands like a star on the battlements. It is better to follow Hector
to the fight, and Guinevere to the sad cloisters of Almesbury, and the
Ancient Mariner to that silent sea where the deathfires gleam by night.
Even to us who have made these magic voyages in our childhood there
comes straying, at times, a pale reflection of that early radiance, a
faint, sweet echo of that early song. Then the streets of the Town of
Stupidity grow soft to tread, and Falstaff’s great laugh frightens Mr.
Despondency into a shadow. Then Madeline smiles on us under the wintry
moonlight, and Porphyro steals by with strange sweets heaped in baskets
of wreathed silver. Then we know that with the poets there is perpetual
youth, and that for us, as for the child dreaming in the firelight, the
shining casements open upon fairyland.
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