indoors seems dry and without meaning. A barnyard chanticleer and his
family afford more matter than the best book ever written. His coral red
comb, his silvery scaled legs, his reddened feathers, and his fiery
attitudes, his jolly crow, and all his ways--there's an illustrated
pamphlet, there's a picture-block book for you in one creature only!
Reckon his family, the tender little chicks, the enamelled eggs, the
feeding every day, the roosting, the ever-present terror of the red
wood-dog (as the gipsies call the fox)--here's a Chronicon Nurembergense
with a thousand woodcuts; a whole history. This seems a very simple
matter, and yet it is true that people become intensely absorbed in
watching and living with such things. Add to these the veined elms, whose
innumerable branches divide like the veins or the nerves of a
physiological diagram, or like sprays of delicate seaweed slow turning
from their winter outline to the soft green shading of summer; add to
these the upspringing of the wheat and its slow coming to that maturity
of gold which marks the fulness of the year; consider, then, the
incomparable beauty of the mowing grass. Now remember that they live
among these things, and by daily iteration the dullest mind becomes
wrapped up in and welded to them. Black type on white paper is but a flat
surface after these. Secondly, the books and papers themselves, made and
printed in such enormous quantities, do not touch a country mind. They
have such a cityfied air. Very correct, very scientific, and extremely
well edited, but thin in the matter. Something so stagey--you may see it,
for instance, in the books for children introducing fairies, which
fairies have short skirts, and caper about exactly like a pantomime among
stage frogs and stage mushrooms, and it is quite clear that the artist
who drew them, and the author who wrote of them, actually drew their
inspiration from the boards of a theatre. They have never dreamed among
the cowslips of the real fields, they have never watched the ways of the
birds from under an oak. Children instinctively see that these toy-books