Do you know a chapter in Mr William Canton’s book “The Invisible Playmate” in which, as Carlyle dealt in “Sartor Resartus” with an imaginary treatise by an imaginary Herr Teufelsdroeckh, as Matthew Arnold in “Friendship’s Garland” with the imaginary letters of an imaginary Arminius (Germany in long-past happier days lent the world these playful philosophical spirits), so the later author invents an old village grandpapa, with the grandpapa-name of Altegans and a prose-poem printed in scarecrow duodecimo on paper-bag pages and entitled “Erster Schulgang,” ’first school-going,’ or ‘first day at school’?

The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace in fact.  All over the world—­and all under it too, when their time comes—­the children are trooping to school.  The great globe swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot—–­ shining companies and groups, couples and bright solitary figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about them.

He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely moorlands ... he sees them on the hillsides ... in the woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the seacliffs and on the water-ribbed sands; trespassing on the railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in the ferry-boats; he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only as a strange tradition.

The morning-side of the planet is alive with them:  one hears their pattering footsteps everywhere.  And as the vast continents sweep `eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon’ ... and as new nations with their cities and villages, their fields, woods, mountains and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of these school-going children of the dawn.

What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of childhood?  The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of ’millers and bakers at fisticuffs.’  Most beautiful picture of all, he sees them travelling schoolward by the late moonlight which now and again in the winter months precedes the tardy dawn.

That vision strikes me as being poetically true as well as delightful:  by which I mean that it is not sentimental:  we know that it ought to be true, that in a world well-ordered according to our best wishes for it, it would be naturally true.  It expresses the natural love of Age, brooding on the natural eager joy of children.  But that natural eager joy is just what our schools, in the matter of reading, conscientiously kill.