English literature itself fosters this independent spirit of
criticism by its extraordinary abundance, its own wide liberty of
spirit, its surpassing truthfulness. Our greatest poets and our truest
do not sing to an audience but to their Maker and to His world, and let
anyone who can understand it catch the song, and sing it after them. No
doubt many have fallen from the truth and piped an artificial tune, and
they have had their following. But love for the real and true is very
deep and in the end it prevails, and as far as we can obtain it with
children it must prevail.
Their first acquaintance with beautiful things is best established by
reading aloud to them, and this need not be limited entirely to what
they can understand at the time. Even if we read something that is
beyond them, they have listened to the cadences, they have heard the
song without the words, the words will come to them later. If there is
good ground for the seed to fall upon, and we sow good seed, it will
come up with its thirtyfold or more, as seed sown in the mind seems
always to come up, whether it be good or bad, and even if it has lain
dormant for years. There are good moments laid up in store for the
future when the words, which have been familiar for years, suddenly
awake to life, and their meaning, full-grown, at the moment when we need
it, or at the moment when we are able to understand its value, dawns
upon the mind.
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