Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/122

 wrong one. But what, we may ask, is the real mischief that ensues in any such instance? Is the circumstance of his not understanding a particular term, which he happens to hear, or to read, any greater harm than his knowing no-thing, at present, of the thousands of words which do not come in his way? or if we think of the single passage in which some such unknown word occurs, it does not always follow that no meaning will be gathered from it, for want of the one unknown word; and besides, the understanding of a sentence, or paragraph, implies much more than the ability to tell what each separate word means; so that the error, or the deficiency, in regard to one or two words, will often be found to bear a small proportion to the general confusion or misapprehension that attaches to the structure of the sentence, or to the dependence of ideas through a paragraph. An unknown word in a sentence is like a deep shadow in a landscape:just on that spot the eye discriminates nothing; but many a sentence, the meaning of every single word of which a child can give you, is all dim as twilight, or absolutely dark as night.

Words learned in the first instance by formal explanation, are found to be peculiarly liable to ambiguities of apprehension, or to be substituted one for another; and they continue to be the last words in the language that promptly and appropriately occur, when wanted in extemporaneous discourse. With a view therefore to an ulterior advantage, it is desirable that the wide wealth of the language should come into the mind in the natural order; that is to say, by a gradual familiarity, first with the mere soundsnot understood; and then with the meaning, by many steps of approximation.

Poetry for children should then be freely sprinkled with long words, and with words of less frequent occurrence. What we have more to guard against than hard words, or than tropes, or bold metaphors (which children often catch with ease and delight) are either sentiments, of a kind with