E. Nesbit (Mrs. Hubert Bland) is an English writer who for many years
has enjoyed widespread and deserved popularity as a writer of children's
books.
'The world where children live is so full of amazing and
incredible-looking things that turn out to be quite real.' This sentence
from the story supplies us with the theme the wording of the bald
analyst requires. For him who simply reads for the mere narrative, no
such analyzing is really necessary--provided there still linger with him
the manifold fancies that peopled his childhood. Of course Ernest was an
extraordinary child--like Shelley or William Blake, it may be. Just such
a child as Hawthorne would adore. To appreciate the story in all its
fineness, we must ourselves have something of that abnormality. Else we
shall be as impervious as the crinolined aunts, and as unsympathetic
toward Ernest's experience as are some readers to Hawthorne's fanciful
_Snow Image_.