"The lightning and thunder
They go and they come;
But the stars and the stillness
Are always at home."

But others come perilously near mere versified moralising. Lewis
Carroll's nonsense verses in the two famous _Alice_ books are supreme
among their kind; but are they not sometimes just a shade too
ingenious, or too adult in wit? Probably Stevenson, in those seemingly
artless poems in _A Child's Book of Verse_, comes nearest to a level
perfection. Who has ever approached him in his power to understand and
express the small child's world, desires and delights, without a trace
of the grown-up's condescension or self-consciousness?

Well, these great ones are no longer in the world; yet, with the
recognition of their genius, there is the usual danger of bemoaning
the lack of worthy successors. Not but what there is some excuse for
such lamentation; for this reason that every Christmas there is a
veritable flood of children's verse, a great deal of which is either
painfully didactic, painfully sentimental, painfully funny or
painfully foolish.

What I wish to do at the moment is to call attention to the fact that
there is one man alive in England--one of many, I do not doubt: but
one at a time!--who is doing "nonsense verses" for children which are
guiltless of all the faults I have indicated above.

Jack Goring is known among some of his friends as "The Jolly
Rhymster." He writes his verses first for his own children, and then
publishes them from time to time for the pleasure of other children.
The secret of his success is partly that he knows that even small
children like a story to be an adventure; partly that he understands
how their own romances, the things they picture or hum to themselves
when well-meaning adults are not worrying them, or rather, trying to
amuse them, begin--wherever they may end!--with a perfectly tangible
object, such as a pillar-box, a rag-doll or a toy locomotive. One of
"The Jolly Rhymster's" best things begins--

"Finger-post, finger-post, why do you stand
Pointing all day with your silly flat hand?"

--which is exactly the sort of question that a very small child in all
probability does really ask itself when it has seen a finger-post day
after day at a cross-roads. How the poem continues and where it ends
you must find out for yourself. It's all in a book called _The Ballad
of Lake Laloo_.

In the recently published volume[15] that now lies before me, this
t