2. Of the three stories, Puss in Boots, Jack and the Bean Stalk, and Little Red Riding Hood, which would you select to tell to a child of five? Give the reasons for your choice.

3. Examine Jacobs' English Fairy Tales and Lang's Blue Fairy Book. What seems to you the chief difference between the two collections?

4. Name three fables which you would recommend to tell to children in the first grade. Give reasons for your choice.

5. Read The Tiger, the Brahmin and the Jackal in Jacobs' Indian Fairy Tales (or in Bryant's Stories to Tell; or in Wiggin's and Smith's The Fairy Ring). If possible read or tell it to a child. Read also Big Claus and Little Claus in Andersen's Fairy Tales (given also in Lang's Yellow Fairy Book and Scudder's Children's Book). Which do you think the better story for use with children, and why?

6. Read The Princess on the Glass Hill in Lang's Blue Fairy Book (also in Wiggin's and Smith's Fairy Ring), or, East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon in Lang or Wiggin and Smith. Compare it with Andersen's Swineherd. Which would be preferred by most children under ten, and why?

7. Select one story to illustrate each of the following qualities: Courtesy, Generosity, Perseverance, Temper

ance.

8. Read Rumpelstiltskin in Grimm, in Lang, in Norton's Heart of Oak Books, v. 3, in Scudder, in Wiggin and Smith, and in any other place you can find it. Which version do you think the best? Why? Compare this story with Tom-Tit-Tot in Jacobs' English Fairy Tales, or in Hartland's English Folk and Fairy Tales, or

in Tileston's Children's Treasure Trove of Pearls. Which story do you think children would prefer? Why? Try the experiment of reading or telling both stories to a class or group of children.

9. Name several legends which you think would appeal especially to boys of twelve. Give reasons for your choice.

10. Read one story from Hawthorne's Wonder Book, and one from Kingsley's Greek Heroes. Which author seems to you to most successfully present the myth to children? Have you ever known a child who very much preferred one of these two books to the other? Read selections from each book to a child or a class of children and note which book seems the more popular.

II. Mention two legends and two modern fairy tales which you think especially suitable for girls of twelve or thirteen. Give reasons for your selection.

12. Is there any folk-tale, or legend, which from your own experience you think should not be given to children? If so, why?

Chapter XVI

POETRY

When the world was a quieter, less bustling place, before ears were deafened by the creaking of machinery and green places were blackened by the smoke of factories, people had more time for poetry. In olden days the minstrel was a welcome visitor, whether he stopped on the village green or sought admission at the castle. gate. For years there was such a demand for songs and for stories in verse that ballads were peddled all over England by the chapman. Perhaps at no time in the world's history has there seemed as little natural taste for poetry as to-day. Where we find one child who delights in the Blue Poetry Book, we find dozens who regard poetry only as a school task.

For

Why Children Do Not Care for Poetry.— 1. Indifference to poetry on the part of adults. The children's feeling is due largely to the attitude toward poetry assumed by the adults with whom they are associated. the one adult who is familiar with the poets of the past and interested in the poetry of the present, there are a hundred who are utterly indifferent. When youngsters of five or six announce that they do not like poetry," they are only reflecting something in the atmosphere around them. While there may be some few people whose bent, natural or acquired, makes poetry for them a sealed book, for the majority of us it should be a natu

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ral form of enjoyment, inspiration and relaxation. No amount of conscientious effort on our part to cultivate in children a love of poetry will be of any avail unless we love it ourselves.

2. Unwise Selection. Many of the poems selected by adults for children to read and memorize, belong to children only in name; for example, Whittier's Barefoot Boy, which expresses the feelings of middle-age looking back on boyhood. Many of Eugene Field's poems are reminiscent of childhood, rather than childlike in tone. How most children feel about this type of poem is illustrated by the little girl to whom an older friend suggested Mrs. Browning's "Child's Thought of God," as a poem to be learned by heart. After a conscientious effort to become interested, she quietly laid it aside, selecting for herself and memorizing with great enjoyment Mary Howitt's" Fairies of the Caldon Low."

3. Method of study. If a child's first and perhaps only association with a poem is a careful word by word analysis, it is morally certain that he is not going to love that poem and very probable that he will never love any other. Those of us who cried with the Knight of Snowden,

"Come one, come all, this rock shall fly

From its firm base as soon as I,"

shared the exile of the noble Douglas and the lovely Ellen, thrilled at the gathering of Clan Alpine, and lived for days in a world of Romance with the Lady of the Lake, are inclined to feel indignant on finding children confronted with questions which bring them rudely to earth. Unless children are first allowed to feel the romantic spirit of the poem they will gain little from a dis

cussion of Scott's use of color words, or the effect of proper names in his verse.

Value of Poetry.— If we are inclined to feel that it is of little consequence whether or not children are encouraged to become poetry lovers, let us think what it means to go through life without an appreciation of poetry. As Bliss Perry says, "Your true enthusiast [for poetry] is caught young." And so a love of poetry should be cultivated in boys and girls, not only because the music and swing of its verse, its stirring spirit, its beauty and magic and mystery belong to childhood, but also because he who makes a poetry lover of a child sends out into the world a man better equipped to bear "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"; a man quicker to see and feel the beauty around him and stronger "when in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," because of these keener perceptions. "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world," said Shelley. "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination and poetry ministers to the effect by acting on the cause." And he adds, "What were virtue, patriotism, friendship - what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit, what were our consolation on this side of the grave and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare. not ever soar?" 1

Qualities in Poetry Which Children Like.— 1. Rhyme and rhythm are the qualities which make the earliest appeal to children,- witness the fondness of very little children for repeating aloud the Mother Goose rhymes. Nowhere do we find more perfect rhythm than

1 Essay on poetry.