for himself, before he could speak plain, a realm less fairy-like but more fantastic, whose ideal hero was named "Mr. Dowdy." The materials for his career were all drawn from the incidents of daily life in the streets of Boston, where the child dwelt; and nothing was seen from the windows that was not immediately glorified among the incidents of Mr. Dowdy's life. Going once to spend a night at the house, I found the elder members of the family quite excited about a public meeting which they had attended, and which had been broken up by a mob. I had petitioned, as usual, that the little boy might sleep with me, for his imagination, like that of most children, was liveliest at first waking, and his prattle was, when taken in moderation, a great delight. I accordingly found his pretty head lying on my pillow at bed-time, and was aroused the next morning, to listen with drowsy ears to Mr. Dowdy in full career. Nestling close to me, the young narrator proceeded. The excitements of the night previous had added to his vocabulary a new word; and, accordingly, "Mobs" appeared on the scene as a new figure, a sort of collective unit, antagonistic to all gooda prince of the powers of evil-a malign being who made unseemly noises, broke benches in halls, and forced peaceful aunts to flee for their lives. To "Mobs" malignant enters the virtuous and triumphant Dowdy, and the scene thus proceeds:

"Then Mobs come up'tairs again, make a noise, frighten the people, frighten Aunty. Then Mr. Dowdy come; he set his dog on Mobs; eat him all up; drive him away." Then rising in bed, with an air of final decision and resistless fate:

"It says in Queen Victoria's book, that outragis Mobs must be put down-'tairs!"

So heartily had I gone along with the flow of narrative, that I hardly felt disposed to question the infallible oracle thus cited, and "The Koran or the Sword" seemed hardly a more irresistible appeal than Queen Victoria's book. I had not the slightest conception what it meant; but, on inquiry at breakfast, I was shown one of those frightful medical almanacs, such as are thrown in at unoffending front doors. This, it seemed, had been seized upon by one of the elder boys, and one of its portraits had been pronounced to look just like the pictures of Prince Albert. It had afterward passed to my little friend, who had christened it, for the alleged resemblance, "Queen Victoria's book," and had hung it on the wall, to be

henceforth cited solemnly, as containing the statutes of the imaginary realm where the Dowdies dwelt.

More commonly, I suppose, this ideal being is incarnated in a doll. I knew a little girl who spent a winter with two maiden ladies, and who had been presented by one of them with a paper doll, gorgeously arrayed. She named it the Marquis, and at once assigned to that nobleman the heart and hand of her younger hostess. He was thenceforth always treated with the respect due to the head of the house; a chair and plate were assigned him at table, though, for reasons of practical convenience, he usually sat in the plate. "Good-morning"

must always be said to him. The best of everything must be first offered to him, or else Lizzie was much hurt, and the family were charged with discourteous neglect. Indeed she always chose to take the tone that he did not receive quite the consideration to which his rank and services entitled him; and when she first awaked in the morning, she would give reproving lectures to his supposed spouse. "He does everything for you," the child would say to this lady; "he earns money, and buys you all that you have; he shovels your paths for you"-this being perhaps on a snowy morning when that process was audible—“ and yet you do not remember all his kindness." The whole assumed relationship was treated as an absolute reality, and the lively farce lasted, with undiminished spirit, during the whole of a New England winter.

It is matter for endless pondering. What place does this sort of thing really occupy in a child's mind? It is not actually taken for truth; the child will sometimes stop in full career and say: "But this is all makebelieve, you know," and then fling itself again into the imaginary drama, as ardently as ever. These little people know the distinction between truth and falsehood, after all, and the great Turenne, when a boy, challenged a grown-up officer for saying that Quintus Curtius was only a romance. These fancies are not real; they are simply something that is closer than reality. This makes the charm of that inexhaustibly fascinating book, "Alice in the Looking-Glass," a book which charms every child, and which I have yet heard quoted by the President of the London Philological Society in his annual address, and to the reading of a chapter of which I have seen Mr. Darwin listen with boyish glee by his own fireside. No other book comes so near to the

very atmosphere of the dawning mind, that citizen of an inverted world, where the visions are half genuine, and the realities half visions. After Alice in the story has once stepped into the looking-glass, passing through it to the world where everything is reversed, she is at once amazed by everything and by nothing. It does not seem in the least strange to be talking with the queen of the white chessmen, or to have her remember the things that are not to happen till week after next. Alice in the pictures never loses the sweet bewildered expression we know so well, and yet she is "always very much interested in questions of eating and drinking," and is as human and charming as Pet Marjorie. Who shall disentangle the pretty complication? The real and unreal overlap and interpenetrate each other in a child's mind, film upon film, till they can be detached only by a touch as subtile as that of Swinburne, when he essays to separate the successive degrees of remoteness in the portrait of a girl looking at her own face in a mirror, -a poem on the picture of a likeness, the shadow of the shadow of a shade.

"Art thou the ghost, my sister,-
White sister there?

Am I the ghost,-who knows?
My hand, a fallen rose,
Lies snow-white on white snows, and

takes no care.' Nor does it require any peculiarly gifted temperament to bring forth these phenomena of childhood. Given the dawning mind as agent, and the wonderful universe as material, and all else follows of itself. Some of the most remarkable stories I have ever known were told of children whose maturer years revealed nothing extraordinary, just as I heard the other day of a girl who could hum the second to a musical air before she could speak, and who, on growing up, proved to have hardly any ear for music. There never was a child so matter-of-fact, perhaps, but his mind, on coming in contact with the outer world, encountered experiences as hazy as the most dreamy poet could depict. In older people we can discriminate between different temperaments, but childhood is in itself a temperament, or does the work of one; and it is brought face to face with a universe of realities so vast and bewildering that you may add all the realm of the impossible and hardly make the puzzle more profound.

In Hans Andersen's story, the old hen assures her chickens that the world is very much larger than is commonly supposed that indeed it stretches to the other side of

the parson's orchard, for she has looked through a hole in the fence and has seen. But to the child, the whole realm of knowledge is the parson's orchard, and all experience is only a glimpse through some new hole in the fence. What deceives us elders is, that the child placidly keeps on his way through this world of delusion, full of his school and his play, and accepting everything as easily as we accept the impossibilities of our dreams. He is no more concerned with your philosophical analysis of his mental processes than were the pigeons reared by Darwin with the inferences he drew from their plumage and their shapes. Holding in himself, could we but understand him, the key to all mysteries, the urchin does not so much as suspect that there is a key to be sought. If he bestows one thought upon the problem of his existence, he dismisses it easily with the assumption that grown-up people understand it all. But his indifference lulls the grown-up people also, and even as we watch him his childhood passes, and his fancies "fade into the light of common day."

The

Thus much for the forms which a child's fancy wears. They might be further illustrated by endless examples, but let us now consider the influence exerted by this faculty upon the other powers. It is certain, to begin with, that the imagination is, next to love, the most purifying influence of a child's life. In proportion as the little creature absorbs itself in an ideal world, it has a mental pre-occupation "driving far off each thing of sin and guilt." Indolence or selfish reverie may come in, doubtless, but not coarseness. In a strongly imaginative childish nature, even if evil seems to enter, it leaves little trace behind, and the soul insensibly clears itself once more. foundations of virtue are laid in the imagination, before conscience and reason have gained strength. This is according to Plato's theory of the true education, as given in the second book of "The Laws.” "I mean by education," he says, "that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children; when pleasure and friendship, and pain and hatred of vice] are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, and who find them, when they have attained reason, to be in harmony with her. This harmony of the soul, when perfected, is virtue."

I do not, by any means, assert that the ideal temperament tends to keep a child from all faults-only from the grosser faults.

The imagination may sometimes make him appear cowardly, for instance, through the vividness with which he imagines dangers that do not touch the nerves of the stolid or prosaic. On the other hand, the same faculty may make him brave, when excited by a great purpose, excluding all immediate fears. So the imagination may make him appear cruel sometimes, when it takes the form of an intense desire to solve the mystery of life and death, and to assert the wondrous fact of human control over them; an impulse beginning when the boy kills his first bird, and not always satiating itself in the most experienced hunter. But the same imaginative power may also make him humane, if it be led to dwell on the sufferings of the animal, the bereaved nest, the dying young. "God gives him wings and I shoot him down," says Bettine. "Ah, no; that chimes not in tune." I suppose we are all at times more sentimental than we consent to acknowledge, and at other times more hard-hearted; and it is for education so to direct our imaginative power that it shall help us in the contest between right and wrong.

Nevertheless parents, as must be owned, often regard the imagination as a faculty to be dreaded for their children. People are like Mr. Peter Magnus in Pickwick, who disliked anything original, and did not see the necessity for it. They assume that this faculty is a misleading gift, tending to untruth-making a boy assert that a hundred cats are fighting in the garden, when there are only his own and another. Yet even this extreme statement is not to be ranked among deliberate falsehoods-it is only an intense expression, what the Greeks called a plural of reverence. For the boy two cats are as good or as bad as a hundred, if they only scratch and sputter enough, which, indeed, they are apt to do. He cannot report the battle as greater than his imagination sees it. Objectively there may be but two cats, subjectively there are a thousand. Indeed, each single animal expands before his eyes like that dog in Leech's "Brown, Jones, and Robinson," which is first depicted as it seemed to those travelers-vast, warlike, terrific;-and afterward, as it would have seemed to the unimaginative observer, only a poor little barking cur. To give the full value of the incident both pictures are needful, and it is only when the power of expression matures that we learn to put both into one, securing vividness without sacrificing truth.

Professor Jared Sparks, the most painstaking of historians, used to tell us in college that no man could write history well without enough of imaginative power to make it graphic.

The fables of children and of child-like nations, even where they give tongues to animals and trees, have an element of truth which causes them now to be collected for the purposes of science. While the philosopher looks for the signs of human emotion in the facial expression of animals, children boldly go farther, and attribute words as well as signs. "I was never so be-rhymed," says Shakespeare's Rosalind, "since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember." But children, as Heine says, still remember when they were animals and trees; and the theory of transmigration always has great fascination for them, as all those who were brought up on "Evenings at Home" will recall. Even the conception of their own preexistence sometimes gets into their heads. A meditative little fellow, the son of a friend of mine, waked one morning with the mystical remark on his lips: "Mamma, we have all been here more than once, and I was only the last that was sent." In the thought of God and of the future life, too, their imaginations have play, sometimes leading to the most familiar and amusing utterances, and then to words that help older minds to trust a higher guidance, and to keep an outlook into spheres unseen. The easy faith of children strengthens our own, and reminds us that the very word "juvenile" comes from the Latin juvo, which means "to help."

Every autumn I collect in my room the young seed-vessels of the common milkweed, which may be found by every roadside. They presently open, and all winter long the graceful tufts of sheeny silk are slowly detaching themselves with constant, tireless, noiseless motion; each mounting into the currents of warm air and silently floating away. You cannot keep these little voyagers down; you cannot guide them as they soar; they are presently found clinging in unexpected places and are set free at a touch, to float away again; they occupy the room with a delicate aërial life of their own. Like these winged things are the fancies of childhood, giving to the vital seed of thought its range; bearing it lightly over impurities and obstructions, till it falls into some fitting soil at last, there to recreate itself and bear fruit a hundred fold.