A Child’s Garden of Verses – Robert Louis Stevenson
In “A Child’s Garden of Verses” all sorts of curious child’s thoughts, quaint ideas and humor are jumbled in together and jostle one another on the pages bubbling over with mirth and sunny expression. Yet we can scarcely read a line without perceiving under all this the warmth and depth of heart of the man, Stevenson. If we call to mind what he says in one of his essays, that the true mark of the romancist is ” to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader and to obey the ideal laws of the day dream,” then the farther we read the more we are struck by his wealth of sympathy. But the more fully we feel his marvelous capacity for loving, the less we wonder at his choosing the children to lavish so much of it upon. And here we begin to sound more deeply the real meaning and purpose of the book. A man of his great heart needs comfort and sympathy, and to whom could he turn for more sincere and disinterested affection than to the children? With the child’s quick discrimination between those who come to them selfishly and those who come to them bringing as well as asking love, we feel that they have opened their little hearts and arms to him as wide as they would go, and that they have walked together hand in hand as good comrades on an equal footing.
A Child’s Garden of Verses
Format: Paperback.
A Child’s Garden of Verses.
ISBN: 9783849676278.
Available at amazon.com and other venues.
The poems included in A Child’s Garden of Verses (from Wikipedia):
Part I – A Child’s Garden of Verses
To Alison Cunningham
Bed in Summer
A Thought
At the Sea-side
Young Night Thought
Whole Duty of Children
Rain
Pirate Story
Foreign Lands
Windy Nights
Travel
Singing
Looking Forward
A Good Play
Where Go the Boats?
Auntie’s Skirts
The Land of Counterpane
The Land of Nod
My Shadow
System
A Good Boy
Escape at Bedtime
Marching Song
The Cow
Happy Thought
The Wind
Keepsake Mill
Good and Bad Children
Foreign Children
The Sun’s Travels
The Lamplighter
My Bed is a Boat
The Moon
The Swing
Time to Rise
Looking-glass River
Fairy Bread
From a Railway Carriage
Winter-time
The Hayloft
Farewell to the Farm
Northwest Passage: Good Night, Shadow March, In Port
The Child Alone
The Unseen Playmate
My Ship and I
My Kingdom
Picture-books in Winter
My Treasures
Block City
The Land of Story-books
Armies in the Fire
The Little Land
Garden Days
Night and Day
Nest Eggs
The Flowers
Summer Sun
The Dumb Soldier
Autumn Fires
The Gardener
Historical Associations
Envoys
To Willie and Henrietta
To My Mother
To Auntie
To Minnie
To My Name-child
To Any Reader
(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
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