stone wall of hard facts, they can never look up into the sky and see
the winged and beautiful thoughts freely disporting there. They make
no distinction between truth and fact, yet truth is of the spirit and
fact of the flesh; and truth, because it is of the spirit, may appear
under many forms, even under the form of play. All rightly told and
rightly conceived fairy-tales are true just as a good picture is true.
The painter uses oil, turpentine, and pigment to represent the wool
of a sheep, the water of a pond, the green spears of grass. Some
literal-minded person might say that he was lying because he pretented
that his little square of canvas truthfully represented grazing sheep
at the brook-side, but most of us recognize that he is really telling
the truth only in another than an every day form. In the same way
the writer of fairy-tales tells the truth, using the pigments of the
imagination.

If children ask whether a given story is true or not, answer without
hesitation, "yes." It is true, but it is a fairy kind of truth; it
is inside truth. There is magic in it and a mystery. The child who is
never allowed to read fairy tales, the man or the woman who prefers
the newspaper to a good book of fiction, misses much in life. It is
not only that the imagination--the divinest quality of man, because
the quality that makes man in his degree a creator--does not receive
culture, and that he misses the indescribable intellectual ecstasy
that comes only with the setting free of the wings of the mind, but
that also he is inevitably shorn of his sympathy and shut up to a
narrow circle of interests.

[Sidenote: Imagination and Sympathy]

For sympathy, above all moral qualities, is dependent upon