child, but the subjective one also--that in ourselves, namely, which is
innocent and pure, and without which we had better not be at all. Now I do
not mean to say that the only medicine that can cure this malady is
legitimate children's literature; wise parents are also very useful,
though not perhaps so generally available. My present contention is that
the right sort of literature is an agent of great efficiency, and may be
very easily come by. Children derive more genuine enjoyment and profit
from a good book than most grown people are susceptible of: they see what
is described, and themselves enact and perfect the characters of the story
as it goes along.

Nor is it indispensable that literature of the kind required should
forthwith be produced; a great deal, of admirable quality, is already on
hand. There are a few great poems----Spenser's "Faerie Queene" is one--
which no well regulated child should be without; but poetry in general is
not exactly what we want. Children--healthy children--never have the
poetic genius; but they are born mystics, and they have the sense of
humor. The best way to speak to them is in prose, and the best kind of
prose is the symbolic. The hermetic philosophers of the Middle Ages are
probably the authors of some of the best children's stories extant. In
these tales, disguised beneath what is apparently the simplest and most
artless flow of narrative, profound truths are discussed and explained.
The child reads the narrative, and certainly cannot be accused of
comprehending the hidden philosophical problem; yet that also has its
share in charming him. The reason is partly that true symbolic or
figurative writing is the simplest form known to literature. The simplest,
that is to say, in outward form,--it may be indefinitely abstruse as to
its inward contents. Indeed, the very cause of its formal simplicity is
its interior profundity. The principle of hermetic writing was, as we
know, to disguise philosophical propositions and results under a form of