ivity of the spirit, and we must all value
that before we can value works of art rightly: and ultimately we must
value this glory of the universe, to which we give the name of beauty
when we apprehend it." Again he says, "Parents, nurses and teachers
ought to be aware that the child when he forgets himself in the beauty
of the world is passing through a sacred experience which will enrich
and glorify the whole of his life."

If all this is what literature means in a child's experiences of life,
then it must be given a worthy place in the time-table and curriculum
and in the serious preparation by the teacher for her work.

CHAPTER XXII

EXPERIENCES OF THE NATURAL WORLD

The first experiences the child gains from the world of nature are those
of beauty, of sound, colour and smell. Flowers at first are just lovely
and sweet-smelling; the keen senses of a child are more deeply satisfied
with colour and scent than we have any idea of, unless some faint memory
of what it meant remains with us. But he begins to grasp real scientific
truth from his experiences with the elements which have for him such a
mysterious attraction; by the very contact with water something in the
child responds to its stimulus. Mud and sand have their charms, quite
intangible, but universal, from prince to coster; a bonfire is something
that arouses a kind of primeval joy. Again, race experience reproducing
itself may account for all this, and it must be satisfied. The demand
for contact with the rest of nature is a strong and fierce part of human
nature, and it means the growth of something in life that we cannot do
without. We induce children to come into our schools when this hunger is
at its fiercest, and very often we do nothing to satisfy it, but set
them in rooms to look at things inanimate when their very being is
crying out for life. "I want something and I don't know what to want" is
the expression of a state very frequent in children, and not infrequent
in grown-up people, because they have been balked of something.

How, then, can we provide for their experience of this side of life? We
have tried to do so in the past by object and nature lessons, but we
must admit that they are not the means by which young children seek to
know life, or by which they appreciate its beauty. We have been trying
to kill too many birds with one stone in our economic way; "to train the
powers of observation," "to teach a child to express himself,"