literature will be to children as they grow up, what we have
made it to them in the beginning. There will always be the exceptional
few, privileged ones, who seem to have received the key to it as a
personal gift. They will find their way without us, but if we have the
honour of rendering them service we may do a great deal even for them in
showing where the best things lie, and the way to make them one's own.
But the greater number have to be taken through the first steps with
much thought and discernment, for taste in literature is not always easy
to develop, and may be spoiled by bad management at the beginning. We
are not very teachable as a nation in this matter--our young taste is
wayward, and sometimes contradictory, it will not give account of
itself, very likely it cannot. We have inarticulate convictions that
this is right, and suits us, and something else is wrong as far as our
taste is concerned, and that we have rights to like what we like and
condemn what we do not like, and we have gone a considerable way along
the road before we can stop and look about us and see the reason of our
choice. English literature itself fosters this independent spirit of
criticism by its extraordinary abundance, its own wide liberty of
spirit, its surpassing truthfulness. Our greatest poets and our truest
do not sing to an audience but to their Maker and to His world, and let
anyone who can understand it catch the song, and sing it after them. No
doubt many have fallen from the truth and piped an artificial tune, and
they have had their following. But love for the real and true is very
deep and in the end it prevails, and as far as we can obtain it with
children it must prevail.

Their first acquaintance with beautiful things is best established by
reading aloud to them, and this need not be limited entirely to what
they can understand at the time. Even if we read something that is
beyond them, they have listened to the cadences, they have heard the
song without the words, the words will come to them later. If there is
good ground for the seed to fall upon, and we sow good seed, it will
come up with its thirtyfold or more, as seed sown in the mind seems
always to come up, whether it be good or bad, and even if it has lain
dormant for years. There are good moments laid up in store for the
future when the words, which have been familiar for years, suddenly
awake to life, and their meaning, full-grown, at the moment when we need