ty should be the last
to welcome the higher freedoms of thought; but it is a shame, we trust,
which will not befall our country. We ourselves have, it is true, as
little affection as most men for that sort of "free thinking" which
consists in pouring out upon the public the mere wash and cerebral
excretion of unclean spirits; but when any man has brought to a
consideration of the greatest facts a pure and reverent spirit, he is
entitled to present the results of his meditations with manly
directness and vigor, as Mr. Alger has done in the work before us.

The "Complete Bibliography of the Subject" is an admirable piece of
work. We present our respects to Mr. Ezra Abbot, Jr., and wish that many
an earnest literary laborer had such a "friend."

_Dream Children._ By the Author of "Seven Little People and their
Friends." Cambridge: Seaver & Francis.

The children seem to have found their Dickens at last. But, of course,
it was to be expected that the child's Dickens would be different, in
some important respects, from the Dickens of grown-up men and women. And
so he is. Children do with the world in their thoughts pretty much as
they will; and the genuine artist, working for children, must recognize
this, or he will utterly fail. The author of "Dream Children," who made
his introduction to the reading public as the author of "Seven Little
People and their Friends," has the rare faculty of realizing for himself
the exact position and attitude of the child. This position he takes so
earnestly that he has nowhere the air of assumption or arbitrary
fiction. The child lives so much in pictures! But the pictures must not
betray one single feature of unreality, or the whole effect is spoiled;
a moral may be pointed or a tale adorned, but the child has lost his
natural food. We need such works as that under present notice to keep
children from starving,--works that are not mechanically adapted to
children, but which come to them as their own fresh, pure thoughts come,
bringing them pictures like those which their own untrammelled fancy
paints for them.

We have no space to enter into any details here. The children must do
that for themselves; but not the children alone. For, as now and then we
come upon a piece of Art, a painting or a statue, which from its subject
would seem to belong peculiarly to the child's world, but which, because
it is genuine Art, as to its manner and execution, rises out of this
confinement to a sing