Page:Essays in idleness.djvu/50

 38 But it is never through infantine or juvenile verses that the end is reached. There is no poet dearer to the young than Tennyson, and it was not the least of his joys to know that all over the English-speaking world children were tuning their hearts to the music of his lines, were dreaming vaguely and rapturously over the beauty he revealed. Therefore the insult seemed greater and more wanton when this beloved idol of our nurseries deliberately offered to his eager audience such anxiously babyish verses as those about Minnie and Winnie, and the little city maiden who goes straying among the flowers. Is there in Christendom a child who wants to be told by one of the greatest of poets that

that the shell was pink within and silver without; and that

"Sounds of the great sea

Wandered about.

"Two bright stars

Peep'd into the shell.

'What are they dreaming of?

Who can tell?'