There is also a sort of wild fairy interest in [these tales] which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy stories which have been in later years composed for them.  In the latter case their minds are, as it were, put into the stocks ... and the moral always consists in good moral conduct being crowned with temporal success.  Truth is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred histories of Jemmy Goodchild.

Few nowadays, I doubt, remember Gammer Grethel.  She has been ousted by completer, maybe far better, translations of the Grimms’ “Household Tales”.  But turning back, the other day, to the old volume for the old sake’s sake (as we say in the West) I came on the Preface—­no child troubles with a Preface—­and on these wise words: 

Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic (we might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated by some.  Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise as our judgment or our memory.

And that admirable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real text of my discourse to-day.  I lay no sentimental stress upon Wordsworth’s Ode and its doctrine that ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy.’  It was, as you know, a favourite doctrine with our Platonists of the 17th century:  and critics who trace back the Ode “Intimations of Immortality” to Henry Vaughan’s

     Happy those early days, when I
     Shined in my Angel-infancy.

might connect it with a dozen passages from authors of that century.  Here is one from “Centuries of Meditations” by that poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, whom I quoted to you the other day: 

Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe.  By the Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His special favour I remember them till now....  Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

And here is another from John Earle’s Character of ‘A Child’ in his “Microcosmography”: 

His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what innocence he has out-liv’d.  He is the Christian’s example, and the old man’s relapse:  the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity.  Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got Eternity without a burthen, and exchang’d but one Heaven for another.

Bethinking me again of ’the small apple-eating urchin whom we know,’ I suspect an amiable fallacy in all this:  I doubt if when he scales an apple-bearing tree which is neither his own nor his papa’s he does so under impulse of any conscious yearning back to Hierusalem, his happy home,