the resources of the country, the man of vision discerns, formulates and
directs its spiritual policy and growth; the mechanic builds the house,
but the architect creates it; the artisan makes the tools, but the
artist uses them; the observer sees and records the fact, but the
scientist discovers the law; the man of affairs manages the practical
concerns of the world from day to day, but the poet makes it spiritual,
significant, interesting, worth living in.

The modern child passes through the same stages as did the children of
four thousand years ago. He, too, is a poet. He believes that the world
about him throbs with life and is peopled with all manner of strange,
beautiful, powerful folk, who live just outside the range of his sight;
he, too, personifies light and heat and storm and wind and cold as his
remote ancestors did. He, too, lives in and through his imagination; and
if, in later life, he grows in power and becomes a creative man, his
achievements are the fruits of the free and vigorous life of his
imagination. The higher kinds of power, the higher opportunities of
mind, the richer resources, the springs of the deeper happiness, are
open to him in the exact degree in which he is able to use his
imagination with individual freedom and intelligence. Formal education
makes small provision for this great need of his nature; it trains his
eye, his hand, his faculty of observation, his ability to reason, his
capacity for resolute action; but it takes little account of that higher
faculty which, cooperating with the other faculties, makes him an
architect instead of a builder, an artist instead of an artisan, a poet
instead of a drudge.

The fairy tale belongs to the child and ought always to be within his
reach, not only because it is his special literary form and his nature
craves it, but because it is one of the most vital of the textbooks