rt of childhood they are a symbol not of caste and
oppression but of dignity and beauty and the heroic. Certainly they
are not to be eliminated by throwing at the child's head such adult
platitudes in rhyme as these, and telling him it is poetry. Alas! he
believes you, and that is why he hates the very word poetry all the
rest of his days.

My memory-gem book lies before me as I write, saved I know not how out
of the wreck of boyhood. I have searched it in vain for a single
quotation of lyric song, a single scrap of verse that paints the world
in rosy colors and lets moral platitudes go hang, a single strain of
"Celtic magic." Instead, I learn that as a boy I was taught that--

We are living, we are dwelling
In a grand and awful time.

I find that at eleven years of age--

I held it truth with him who sings
To one clear harp of divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

Indeed, I must have been a very remarkable child, how remarkable I had
not hitherto suspected! Evidently, too, I displayed an early tendency
to melancholia, for I find I was admonished in the following words,
with their incontestable statement of fact:

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.

Whether my sadness was caused by too much reflection on the fact that
life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal, or on
the fact that Bill Carter's air-gun cost more than mine, I cannot now
recall. Either cause would have been sufficient. At any rate I
apparently braced up and smiled once more, for the next page is blank.
That means I went fishing!

Poor kiddies! Shall we grown-ups never learn that their minds don't
work as ours do, and what may be poetry for some of us is cod-liver
oil for them? Why must we be forever nagging them at home with "Don't
do this" and "Don't do that," and forever preaching at them in school
with ponderous prose platitudes cut up into lengths? How much wiser
than we they are, who know that life is free and pleasant and full of
melody and beautiful things, and dreams more real than reality, and
reality born of the dream! Yet we try our best to convince them that
they are wrong. We see to it that Longfellow lies about them in their
infancy.

But perhaps all this is changed since my day, and the nightmare this
battered memory-gem book recalls to my mind is no longer a load on the
c