expression, even though the words may be simple; but they offer the
convenient small change of intellectual currency which it is well for
one to be supplied with at an early stage of one's journey, and they
afford to the teacher a capital opportunity for conversational and other
exercises.

The order of this book is in a general way from the easy to the more
difficult, with an attempt, also, at an agreeable variety. The editor
has purposely avoided breaking up the book into lesson portions or
giving it the air of a text-book. There is no reason why children should
not read books as older people read them, for pleasure, and dissociate
them from a too persistent notion of tasks. It is entirely possible that
some teachers may find it out of the question to lead their classes
straight through this book, but there is nothing to forbid them from
judicious skipping, or, what is perhaps more to the point, from helping
pupils over a difficult word or phrase when it is encountered; the
interest which the child takes will carry him over most hard places. It
would be a capital use of the book also if teachers were to draw upon it
for poems which their pupils should, in the suggestive phrase, learn by
heart. To this purpose the contents are singularly well adapted; for,
from the single line proverb to a poem by Wordsworth, there is
such a wide range of choice that the teacher need not resort to the
questionable device of giving children fragments and bits of verse and
prose to commit to memory. One of the greatest services we can do the
young mind is to accustom it to the perception of _wholes_, and whether
this whole be a lyric or a narrative poem like Evangeline, it is almost
equally important that the young reader should learn to hold it as such
in his mind. To treat a poem as a mere quarry out of which a
particularly smooth stone can be chipped is to misinterpret poetry. A
poem is a statue, not a quarry.