e Emperor's flesh creep, because he thought that
they were right; but he said to himself, 'I must keep it up
through the procession, anyhow.' And he walked on still more
majestically, and the Chamberlains walked behind and carried the
train, though there was none to carry."

This parable of the Emperor without clothes can be matched, for
simplicity and searching directness, against any parable outside of
the Gospels, and it agrees with the Divine parables in exalting the
wisdom of a child. I will not dare to discuss that wisdom here.
I observe that when the poets preach it we tender them our applause.
We applaud Vaughan's lines:--

"Happy those early days, when I
Shin'd in my angel-infancy . . .
When yet I had not walk'd above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back--at that short space--
Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flow'r
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity. . . ."

We applaud Wordsworth's glorious ode--

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! . . ."

We applaud even old John Earle's prose when he tells us of a Child
that--

"The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his
first father, much worse in his breeches. He is the Christian's
example, and the old man's relapse; the one imitates his
pureness, the other falls into his simplicity. . . . His father
hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those
days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what
innocence he hath outlived. . . . Could he put off his body with
his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and
exchanged but one heaven for another."

But while we applaud this pretty confident attribution of divine
wisdom to children, we are much too cautious to translate it into
practice. "It is far too shadowy a notion," says Wordsworth
prudently, "to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our
instincts of immortality;" and he might have ad