as my own experience, assure me also
that it is great--poetry even the greatest--which the youngest crave,
and upon which they may be fed, because it is the simplest. Nature does
not write down her sunsets, her starry skies, her mountains, and her
oceans in some smaller style, to suit the comprehension of little
children; they do not need any such dilution. So I go back to the
"American First Class Book," and affirm it to have been one of the best
of reading-books, because it gave us children a taste of the finest
poetry and prose which had been written in our English tongue, by
British and by American authors. Among the pieces which left a
permanent impression upon my mind I recall Wirt's description of the
eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened in the forest wilderness of
the Blue Ridge, a remarkable word-portrait, in which the very tones of
the sightless speaker's voice seemed to be reproduced. I believe that
the first words I ever remembered of any sermon were those contained in
the grand, brief sentence,--"Socrates died like a philosopher; but
Jesus Christ--like a God!"

Very vivid, too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl
of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the
few short words with which it began--"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man,
and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"--to the happy
waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with
which it ended, it was one sweet picture of lowly life and honorable
poverty irradiated with sacred home-affections, and cheerful in its
rustic homeliness as the blossoms and wild birds of the moorland and
the magic touch of Christopher North could make it. I thought as I
read--

"How much pleasanter it must be to be poor than to be rich--at least in
Scotland!"

For I was beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible
visitation to our own household; and that, in our Cape Ann corner of
Massachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable nor picturesque.
After my father's death, our way of living, never luxurious, grew more
and more frugal. Now and then I heard mysterious allusions to "the wolf
at the door": and it was whispered that, to escape him, we might all
have to turn our backs upon the home where we were born, and find our
safety in the busy world, working among strangers for our daily bread.
Before I had reached my tenth year I began to have rather disturbed
dreams of what it might soo