nd dry, are a bane to the youthful imagination in their stale
sweetness. We must here add, however, that lately we have had some
better success in our attempts since we have learned to distinguish
between the naive natural poetry, which is without reflection, and the
poetry of art, which is conditioned by criticism and an ideal. This
distinction has produced good fruits even in the picture-books of
children. The pretensions of the gentlemen who printed illustrated books
containing nothing more solid than the alphabet and the multiplication
table have become less prominent since such men as Speckter, Froehlich,
Gutsmuths, Hofman (the writer of "Slovenly Peter"), and others, have
shown that seemingly trivial things can be handled with intellectual
power, if one is blessed with it, and that nothing is more opposed to
the child's imagination than the _childishness_ with which so many
writers for children have fallen when they attempted to descend with
dignity from their presumably lofty stand-point. Men are beginning to
understand that Christ promised the kingdom of heaven to little children
on other grounds than because they had as it were the privilege of being
thoughtless and foolish.--

Sec. 97. For youth and maidens, especially as they approach manhood and
womanhood, the cultivation of the imagination must allow the earnestness
of actuality to manifest itself in its undisguised energy. This
earnestness, no longer through the symbolism of play but in its
objective reality, must now thoroughly penetrate the conceptions of the
youth so that it shall prepare him to seize hold of the machinery of
active life. Instead of the all-embracing Epos they should now read
Tragedy, whose purifying process, through the alternation of fear and
pity, unfolds to the youth the secret of all human destiny, sin and its
expiation. The works best adapted to lead to history on this side are
those of biography--of ancient times, Plutarch; of modern times, the
autobiographies of Augustine, Cellini, Rousseau, Goethe, Varnhagen, Jung
Stilling, Moritz, Arndt, &c. These autobiographies contain a view of the
growth of individuality through its inter-action with the influences of
its time, and, together with the letters and memoirs of great or at
least noteworthy men, tend to produce a healthy excitement in the
youth, who must learn to fight his own battles through a knowledge of
the battles of others. To introduce the youth to a knowledge of Nature
a