of truth; it
is inside truth. There is magic in it and a mystery. The child who is
never allowed to read fairy tales, the man or the woman who prefers
the newspaper to a good book of fiction, misses much in life. It is
not only that the imagination--the divinest quality of man, because
the quality that makes man in his degree a creator--does not receive
culture, and that he misses the indescribable intellectual ecstasy
that comes only with the setting free of the wings of the mind, but
that also he is inevitably shorn of his sympathy and shut up to a
narrow circle of interests.

[Sidenote: Imagination and Sympathy]

For sympathy, above all moral qualities, is dependent upon
imagination. If you cannot imagine how you would feel under your
neighbor's conditions, you cannot deeply sympathize with him. The
person of unimaginative mind sympathizes only with those whose
experience and habits are similar to his own. He never escapes
from the narrow circle of his own personality. But the man whose
imagination has been kept flexible and ready from earliest childhood
has within him the power of sympathizing with whatever is human--yes!
even with creatures and things below the human level. Without
imagination, therefore, it is not possible for a man to be a great
scientist, for science demands sympathy with processes and objects
which are not yet human. It is not possible, obviously, for him to be
a great artist of any kind, for all art is interpretation of the world
by means of the imagination. It is not possible for him, even, to be
a good man in any broad sense, for the man whose sympathies are narrow
is often found to be guilty of injustice toward those who lie outside
the pale of those sympathies.

By all means, then, encourage the love of reading in your children,
and get them the best of story-books to read, and subscribe to the
best magazines. Read with them. Let some reading enter into every
day's life; talk over what has been read at the dinner-table, and so
avoid harmful personalities and disagreeable criticisms.

[Sidenote: Books]

As to the books to choose, choose the best. Generally speaking, the
best are those that have some dignity of age upon them. As in music
you chose the folksongs, so in children's literature also choose the
old fashioned fairy stories, such as those collected by the Brothers
Grimm and by Andrew Lang. Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Stories
of course are classics. Hawthorne's Tanglewood