can teach us to
appreciate him. These fed Shakespeare's youth; why should they not
feed our children's? Why indeed? That inborn delight of the young
in all that is marvellous and fantastic--has that a merely evil root?
No surely! It is a most pure part of their spiritual nature; a part
of "the heaven which lies about us in our infancy;" angel-wings with
which the free child leaps the prison-walls of sense and custom, and
the drudgery of earthly life--like the wild dreams of childhood, it
is a God-appointed means for keeping alive what noble Wordsworth
calls

those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised;

*****

by which

Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither:
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

And those old dreams of our ancestors in the childhood of England,
they are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are
most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and
symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth. What, after all, is
any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, a shadow
and a ghostly dream, till it has touched our _hearts_, till we have
found out and obeyed its spiritual lesson? Be sure that one really
pure legend or ballad may bring God's truth and heaven's beauty more
directly home to the young spirit than whole volumes of dry abstract
didactic morality. Outward things, beauty, action, nature, are the
great problems for the young. God has put them in a visible world,
that by what they _see_ they may learn to know the _unseen_; and we
must begin to feed their minds with that literature which deals most
with visible things, with passion manifested in action, which we
shall find in the early writing of our Middle Ages; for then the
collective mind of our nation was passing through its natural stages
of childhood and budding youth, as every nation and every single
individual must at some time or other do; a true "young England,"
always significant and precious to the young. I said there was a
literary art before Shakespeare--an art more simple, more childlike,
more girlish as it were, and therefore all the more adapted for young
minds. But also an art most vigorous and