that age,--and it is for psychologists to say when that age
is,--children think in terms of themselves expressed through their own
activities. This active role should be used not merely as a safety valve
of expression to keep the child a patient listener, but as a tool by
which he may become aware of the form of thought and language. It is
interesting that the children to whom these stories have been read, have
seized upon the rhyme refrains as their own and after a few readings
have joined in saying them as though this were their natural portion.
It is with this hope that I have tried to make the refrains not mere
interludes in the story, as they usually are, but the real skeleton, the
intrinsic thought pattern, the fundamental design. In "How the Singing
Water Gets to the Tub" and "How Spot Found a Home," for instance, the
refrains taken by themselves out of the context, tell the whole story.
It is too soon to say, but I am strong in the hope that through relish
for this kind of active participation in written stories, a small child
may become captivated by the play side of the stories as opposed to the
content and so turn to language as play material in which to fashion
patterns of his own.

For the sake of analysis, I have treated content and form separately.
But I am keenly aware that the divorce of the two is what has made our
stories for children so unsatisfactory. We have good ideas told without
charm of design; and we have meaningless patterns which tickle the ear
for the moment but fade because they spring from no real thought.
Literature is only achieved when the thought pattern and the language
pattern exactly fit. A refrain for the mere sake of recurrent jingle,
that has no genuine no essential recurrence in the thought, is a trick.
If the pattern does not help the thought and the thought suggest the
pattern, there is something wrong. It is an artifice, not art. This
matching of content and form is nothing new. It is and always has been
the basis of good literature. The task that is new is to find thought
sequences, thought relations which are truly childlike and the language
design which is really appropriate to them,--to make both content and
form the child's.

As I said at the beginning, so must I say at the end. These stories are
experiments, experiments both in content and form. To have any value
they must be treated as such. The theses underlying them have been
stated for brevity's sake only in didac