m of the young Republic that has
caused the children of the more mature nation to delight in the
repetition of the patriotic verses. The youthful extravagance of
expression pervading every line is reechoed in the heart of the
schoolboy, who likes to imagine himself, before anything else, a
patriot. But until "Donder and Blitzen" pranced into the foreground as
Santa Claus' steeds, there was nothing in American nursery literature of
any lasting fame. Thereafter, as the custom of observing Christmas Day
gradually became popular, the perennial small child felt--until
automobiles sent reindeer to the limbo of bygone things--the thrill of
delight and fear over the annual visit of Santa Claus that the bigger
child experiences in exploding fire-crackers on the Fourth of July.
There are possibilities in both excitements which appeal to one of the
child's dearest possessions--his imagination.

It is this direct appeal to the imagination that surprises and delights
us in Mr. Moore's ballad. To re-read it is to be amazed that anything so
full of merriment, so modern, so free from pompousness or condescension,
from pedantry or didacticism, could have been written before the latter
half of the nineteenth century. Not only its style is simple in contrast
with the labored efforts at simplicity of its contemporaneous verse, but
its story runs fifty years ahead of its time in its freedom from the
restraining hand of the moralist and from the warning finger of the
religious teacher, if we except Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Wonder Book."

In our examination of the toy-books of twenty years preceding its
publication, we shall find nothing so attractive in manner, nor so
imaginative in conception. Indeed, we shall see, upon the one hand, that
fun was held in with such a tight curb that it hardly ever escaped into
print; and upon the other hand that the imagination had little chance
to develop because of the prodigal indulgence in realities and in
religious experience from which all authors suffered. We shall also see
that these realities were made very uncompromising and uncomfortable to
run counter to. Duty spelled in capital letters was a stumbling-block
with which only the well-trained story-book child could successfully
cope; recreation followed in small portions large shares of instruction,
whether disguised or bare faced. The Religion-in-Play, the
Ethics-in-Play, and the Labor-in-Play schools of writing for children
had arrived in America