When the cows come home, the milk is coming;
Honey's made when the bees are humming.
Duck, drake on the rushy lake,
And the deer live safe in the breezy brake,
And timid, funny, pert little bunny
Winks his nose, and sits all sunny.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.


Now, in comparing this poem with some of the doggerel verse offered to
small children, one is struck with the literary superiority in the
choice of words. Here, in spite of the simplicity of the poem, there
is not the ordinary limited vocabulary, nor the forced rhyme, nor the
application of a moral, by which the artist falls from grace.

Again, Eugene Field's "Hushaby Lady," of which the language is most
simple, yet the child is carried away by the beauty of the sound.

I remember hearing some poetry repeated by the children in one of the
elementary schools in Sheffield which made me feel that they had
realized romantic possibilities which would prevent their lives from
ever becoming quite prosaic again, and I wish that this practice were
more usual. There is little difficulty with the children. I can
remember, in my own experience as a teacher in London, making the
experiment of reading or repeating passages from Milton and
Shakespeare to children from nine to eleven years of age, and the
enthusiastic way they responded by learning those passages by heart.
I have taken with several sets of children such passages from Milton
as the "Echo Song," "Sabrina," "By the Rushy-fringed Bank," "Back,