Project Gutenberg's A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Title: A Child's Garden of Verses
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Illustrator: E. Mars
M. H. Squire
Release Date: May 27, 2008 [EBook #25617]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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A CHILDS
GARDEN
of VERSES
[Illustration]
[Illustration: _A Child's Garden_]
A CHILD'S
GARDEN
of VERSES
By ROBERT
LOUIS
STEVENSON
ILLUSTRATED by
E. MARS
AND M. H. SQUIRE
RAND McNALLY &
COMPANY
CHICAGO
NEW YORK
LONDON
[Illustration]
_Copyright, 1900, by_
ROBERT HOWARD RUSSELL
_Copyright, 1902, by_
RAND MCNALLY & COMPANY
All rights reserved
Edition of 1928
[Illustration]
Made in U. S. A.
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, or Robert Louis Stevenson, as the world
knows him, was still a boy when he published this rare volume of "A
Child's Garden of Verses," although by the calendar he was thirty-five
years old. You and I have sighed, no doubt, to be a boy again, but here
was one who, while he outgrew his knickerbockers, never outgrew the quick
sympathy, the brave heart, the fresh outlook, the confident faith and
buoyant spirit of the little Scotch boy who roamed the hills 'round
Edinburgh. Better than any man of any time he was able to enter into the
heart of a boy, to view things with a boy's eyes, and to write of them in
simple verse, touched with the warmth and color of his rich imagination.
In these "Verses" he writes as a child rather than about children, and in
this lies much of the charm which they possess for little readers. There
is in them the surprise of reality, the beauty of a simple rhythm, and the
mysterious flavor of magic that grips a boy's heart and will not let him
go until the book has become a part of him. Surely this is a rare quality
in schoolbooks.
The Stevensons had been famous engineers for more than a hundre
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