There is a time to _feel_ the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good, and a time to regard all these, as far as may
be, under intellectual relations. If 'the years that bring the
philosophic mind' be anticipated in a child's education, it will be
likely, by reason of the premature philosophy served out to it, to
become a stupid man or woman, with a plentiful lack of both intellect
and soul. Upon the closed bud of reason, while it is not yet ready to be
unfolded, must be brought to bear the genial warmth of sensibility,
sympathy, and enthusiasm; and when it opens in its own good season, it
will not be dwarfed nor canker-bitten.

Sensibility, sympathy, enthusiasm, I repeat, are the elements of the
atmosphere in which the intellectual, the moral, and the religious
nature of a child can alone germinate and healthily grow, and in later
years, bloom and shed a wholesome fragrance.

Stories written for the young must be _concrete_ representations of the
True, the Beautiful, and the Good; in other words, they must be works of
art. Says Browning, in 'The Ring and the Book,'

Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,

that is, bring what is _implicit_ within the soul, into the right
attitude to become _explicit_--bring about a silent adjustment through
sympathy induced by the concrete (it cannot be induced by the abstract);
in other words, prepare the way for the apprehension of the truth--

do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word;

that is, Art, so to speak, is the word made flesh,--_is_ the truth, and,
as Art, has nothing directly to do with an explicit presentation of the
truth. 'The highest, the only operation of Art, as of Nature,' says
Goethe, 'is formation' (Gestaltung).

So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
Deeper than ever the Andante dived,--
So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.

The greatest moral teachers the world has ever known, have exhibited the
least of explicit moralizing. They have embodied their gospels,--clothed
them in _circumstance_,--woven them into a tissue of imagery and
incident and, by so doing, have given them that _vitality_ which alone
can awaken sympathy, and thus induce a mental preparedness for a
reception of t