Page:Essays in idleness.djvu/63

 Rh belong to a late stage of development. Eugénie de Guérin, who recognized as clearly as Sainte-Beuve the "fine penetration" peculiar to children, and who regarded them ever with half-wistful, half-wondering delight, has written some very charming suggestions about the kind of poetry, "pure, fresh, joyous, and delicate," which she considered proper food for these highly idealized little people,—"angels upon earth." The only discouraging part of her pretty pleading is her frank admission that—in French literature, at least—there is no such poetry as she describes, which shows how hard it is to conciliate an exclusive theory of excellence. She endeavored sincerely, in her "Infantines," to remedy this defect, to "speak to childhood in its own language;" and her verses on "Joujou, the Angel of the Playthings," are quaintly conceived and full of gentle fancies. No child is strongly moved, or taught the enduring delight of song, by such lines as these, but most children will take a genuine pleasure in the baby angel who played with little Abel under the myrtle-trees, who made the first doll and blew the first bubble, and who finds a friend in every tiny boy and girl born into this