Moreover, these collections are published in several volumes and
contain much that is mediocre and trivial. As far as the editor has
been able to discover, there is but a single one-volume collection,
and that collection, having been compiled solely for juvenile
readers, is impracticable as a text for college and normal school
classes. In teaching classes in children's literature the present
editor has had to use, as the only possible text, such sets of
literary readers as the _Heart of Oak_ series or such miniature
libraries as the ten-volume _The Children's Hour_ or the eight-
volume _Children's Classics_. This procedure has been both
expensive and inconvenient for teacher and students, besides not
supplying some of the material desirable in any symmetrical outline
of study.

In compiling the book the editor kept in mind several guiding aims.
Foremost was the wish to include in the collection at least one
selection--and that a masterpiece--of each type and kind of
children's literature in the English language. The different species
of prose and poetry; the various kinds of stories, such as fables,
myths, and fairy stories; the fundamental forms of discourse, such as
narration, description, the sketch, the essay, the oration, letters--
nearly all the molds, so to speak, into which the molten literary
stream has flowed all these types are represented by the choicest
specimens in the range of children's literature.

A careful inspection of the selections in this volume will reveal the
rich variety of the material. Specimens are to be found of folk
literature and modern literature, of the romantic, of the realistic,
of the crude and naive, of the artistic and sophisticated, of the
humorous and the pathetic. The editor has tried to find specimens