"If you love enough we are with you everywhere--forever"--that is the
word of the little children that stupid people call "dead." Always
here, playing in the room they loved. Such is the end of _The Golden
Scarecrow_, the most original book by the author of _Fortitude_. It is
the story of a dozen children living about a spacious old square, a
square filled with leisure and the sound of leaves, in the heart of
London. The son of a duke is one, and one the forlornly playing child
of a housekeeper who drank and was untidy, but their lives were all
bound together by the Friend--who is the Friend of Stevenson's
child-verses--who in dangerous or unhappy moments comes to children and
with his great warm arm guides them.... There is a wonderful
fancifulness in _The Golden Scarecrow_, a mellow and gentle beauty; and
a really remarkable ability to enter into the children's own world,
where carpets are vast moors, and the fire whispers secrets, and the
lashing out of a whip of wind suggests things vast and secret and
perilous. Mr. Walpole has "loved enough"; has so loved children and the
little land of the imagination that he has put into this book the
quality which can never be quite plumbed--tenderness. And it is not the
awkward tenderness of the person not born to write; but graceful and
perfect and winning as a Greek vase.
"The fact that childhood is not a mere prelude to adult life but worth
while for its own sake has seldom been more beautifully
expressed."--_Chicago Evening Post_.
"Few adults preserve their line of communication with that world of
fancy so real to children. But when one of rare fancy visualizes it a
chord of kinship is struck; memory rolls back the years, and the heart
responds. Barrie did it in _The Little White Bird_. Hugh Walpole joins
him with _The Golden Scarecrow_."--_Boston Herald_.
"Only those readers of Mr. Walpole's novels who have missed any real
sense of them will be surprised by this singularly attractive series of
sketches. There is an infinite pathos and a quite exquisite charm in
the first sketch, the one which suggests the spirit of them all.... It
cannot be too strongly insisted upon that in these child-studies there
is not a whiff of the pseudo-sentiment about childhood which in some
writings has reached the nauseating point. Mr. Walpole simply has the
very rare gift of actually getting the child's point of view, and we
always feel that he really understands what he is talking
about."--_Providence Journal_.
"In one sense it bears kinship to Barrie's _Peter Pan_ and Maeterlink's
_Blue Bird_, for although it is unlike either of these fairy tales in
material and treatment, it is related to them in that it recreates for
older readers the magical world of the imagination that plays so large a
part in the lives of little folk. Mr. Walpole writes with charm and
tenderness."--_Philadelphia Press_.
"It is as beautiful as it is unusual--a wonderfully sympathetic and
illuminating study of the mind of the child done with an understanding
and sympathy so complete that it is uncanny."--_New York Evening Mail_.