she might try to defy the surrounding ocean, to pit her powers against it, to swim.  She would learn a most practical and useful and withal invigorating accomplishment.  If her busy, watchful “I” could be arrested she might “see” the billows, the sky and the headlands reared on either side of her bay.  She might dance into the water, and see her world dance back.  She would fling herself amongst the wavelets where she stands and splashes.  She might give herself up and know nothing but the beauty and strength around her.  It would not teach her to swim, but she would have taken a step towards the great game of walking upon the waters.

 D.M.  RICHARDSON.

 TRAVELS IN TWO COLOURS.

One is often tempted to suspect that in some schools there is a deep-laid plot to destroy in the bud any love for poetry which children may possess.  Otherwise how is it that little boys and girls are made to commit to memory William Blake at his highest reach of mystical fire, as in Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, or William Wordsworth at his lowest ebb of uninspired simplicity, as in We are seven?  These are very popular, apparently, as poems for children to recite; yet in the one case it is beyond any teacher’s power to show children the unearthly flaming beauty which alone gives the poem its peculiar quality and undefinable power; and in the other the maudlin sentimentalism and almost priggish piety of the verses are positively dangerous to the child’s health of mind.  Both types of recitation work out in the end to this—­that when the child attains adolescence, and the great world of literature dawns on the hungry mind, an evil association of ideas has been established—­the association of poetry, the highest of all arts, either with the saying of lines without meaning, or with the learning of “poems” devoid of what wholesome youth really desires or enjoys.

People may wrangle all night as to whether the normal healthy child is at heart a mystic or a realist; whether he likes fairy tales because they show him a magical world where flowers can talk and umbrellas are turned into black geese, or because they tell of strange romantic things happening to a real human boy like himself; but there can be no shadow of doubt that much of the verse intended for children is either too clever in its humour to make them laugh, or too bald in its matter or tone to stir the romance that is never quite asleep in their hearts.  There are really surprisingly few versifiers who have altogether avoided these errors.  Some of George Macdonald’s Poems for Children are almost perfect, both as regards lyrical form, simplicity of language and in the unobtrusiveness of the inner truth they convey.  For example,

    “The lightning and thunder
       They go and they come;
     But the stars and the stillness
       Are always at home.”