r
than the over-wrought dramatic action which sets all the nerves
a-quiver,--nerves already stimulated to excess by the comedies and
tragedies forced upon the daily lives of children. It is especially
true of children living in crowded cities, shut away from the woods and
hills, constant witnesses of the effects of human passion, that they
need the tonic of a quiet literature rather than the stimulant of a
stormy or dramatic one,--a literature which develops gentle feelings,
deep thought, and a relish for what is homely and homespun, rather than
a literature which calls forth excited feelings.

The essays in this volume are those in which my pupils have expressed an
enthusiastic interest, or which, after careful reading, I have selected
for future use. I have found in them few pages so hard as to require
over much study, or a too frequent use of the dictionary. John
Burroughs, more than almost any other writer of the time, has a
prevailing taste for simple words and simple constructions. "He that
runs may read" him. I have found many children under eleven years of age
who could read a whole page without hesitating. If I discover some words
which I foresee will cause difficulty, I place such on the blackboard
and rapidly pronounce and explain them before the reading. Generally,
however, I find the text the best interpreter of its words. What follows
explains what goes before, if the child is led to read on to the end of
the sentence. It is a mistake to allow children to be frightened away
from choice reading by an occasional hard word. There is no better time
than his reading lesson in which to teach a child that the hard things
of life are to be grappled with and overcome. A mistake also, I think,
is that toilsome process of explanation which I sometimes find teachers
following, under the impression that it will be "parrot work" (as the
stock phrase of the "institutes" has it) for the pupils to read anything
which they do not clearly and fully comprehend. Teachers' definitions,
in such cases, I have often noticed, are no better than dictionary
definitions, and surely everybody knows that few more fruitless things
than dictionary definitions are ever crammed into the memory of a child.
Better far give free play to the native intelligence of the child, and
trust it to apprehend, though it may not yet comprehend nor be able to
express its apprehension in definition. On this subject I am glad to
quote so high an authority a