Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/121

 frigidly exact, and merely true, does not arouse the mind; and, on the other hand, that which is gorgeously descriptive, and highly coloured, fails entirely to attract a child’s ear. Strange as it may seem, I think it is generally true that children will sooner listen to what is purely didactic, if the sentiment and language be at all within their reach, than to a vivid and elaborate description of natural scenery. The poetry which children choose is that which, with a light descriptive brevity, brings the familiar aspects of the visible world before the fancy; and that also, which is simply and briskly narrative, and which is enlivened by turns of humour, and deepened by just moral sentiments, and especially by touches of pity.

We should by no means lose sight of poetry as the medium for imparting, in the easiest manner, a knowledge of the less colloquial portion of the mother tongue; and particularly of the entire class of epithets and descriptive terms. These, as I shall have occasion hereafter to show, it is very desirable to furnish the mind with in rich abundance, and as a main part of its early culture.

With these objects in view, we cannot wish to see poetry for children broken down into monosyllables, or confined to the range of the nursery vocabulary. The wealth and compass of the mother tougue is to be acquired, not by fingering a dictionary, or by committing definitions of words to memory; but by the gradual and incessant extension of that unconscious inductive process, which goes on when words, in their true and infinitely varied connections, are presented to the mindare heard, a first, a second, and a third time; and not understood until, by little and little, a meaning, more and more precise, clusters about the sound. Some teachers, and intelligent mothers, exhibit a very needless alarm lest, in what a child reads, or commits to memory, there should occur any words to which he attaches no meaning, or a