ions,
not to be approached without misgiving, yet not by any means with
mistrust, much less with despair. We of course do not propose to try to
answer all or any of them now, but must be content with throwing out a
few plain thoughts upon the kind of intellectual food we are giving our
children, and especially upon the kind of juvenile literature that we
ought to encourage. We do not claim for the American child any exemption
from the common lot, nor make him out to be above or below the human
nature to which he belongs, in common with the children of the Old
World. He is a chip of the old block; and that old block is from the old
trunk that has been growing for ages, is a great deal older than the
father or mother, as old as mankind; and each new comer into the field
bears with him some traces or remains of all the traits and dispositions
and liabilities that have appeared in the ancestors and become the
heritage of the race. Not only the is the American child of the same
nature as his European contemporary, but he is born into very much of
the same life, the same general circumstances of climate, scenery,
morals, and religion, and surely into much of the same nursery talk and
juvenile amusement, not excepting books. "Mother Goose" has a nursery
catholicity wherever the English language is spoken, that is denied to
any other book; and fruitful as America has been and is in children's
books, we have not yet apparently added a single one to the first rank
of juvenile classics, and have distanced AEsop, Bunyan, De Foe,
Edgeworth, and the old fairy story-tellers, as little as we have
distanced Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Goethe in
the higher imagination.

It may be that the children's books that have been most characteristic
of our native authors have been in important respects a mistake, and the
"Quarterly Review," not without reason, assailed them some years ago in
two articles of considerable sagacity and much patient study. But we
have outgrown them now, and see the error that afflicted them. We have
ceased to think it the part of wisdom to cross the first instincts of
children, and to insist upon making of them little moralists,
metaphysicians, and philosophers, when great Nature determines that
their first education shall be in the senses and muscles, the affections
and fancy, rather than in the critical judgment, logical understanding,
or analytic reason. Peter Parley--Heaven rest his soul!--h