owledge. The productions of our ablest writers cannot
please, until we are familiarized to the ideas which they contain, or
to which they allude.[120]

Poetry is usually supposed to be well suited to the taste and capacity
of children. In the infancy of taste and of eloquence, rhetorical
language is constantly admired; the bold expression of strong feeling,
and the simple description of the beauties of nature, are found to
interest both cultivated and uncultivated minds. To understand
descriptive poetry, no previous knowledge is required, beyond what
common observation and sympathy supply; the analogies and transitions
of thought, are slight and obvious; no labour of attention is
demanded, no active effort of the mind is requisite to follow them.
The pleasures of simple sensation are, by descriptive poetry, recalled
to the imagination, and we live over again our past lives without
increasing, and without desiring to increase, our stock of knowledge.
If these observations be just, there must appear many reasons, why
even that species of poetry which they can understand, should not be
the early study of children; from time to time it may be an agreeable
amusement, but it should not become a part of their daily occupations.
We do not want to retrace perpetually in their memories a few musical
words, or a few simple sensations; our object is to enlarge the sphere
of our pupil's capacity, to strengthen the habits of attention, and to
exercise all the powers of the mind. The inventive and the reasoning
faculties must be injured by the repetition of vague expressions, and
of exaggerated description, with which most poetry abounds. Childhood
is the season for observation, and those who observe accurately, will
afterwards be able to describe accurately: but those, who merely read
descriptions, can present us with nothing but the pictures of
pictures. We have reason to believe, that children, who have not been
accustomed to read a vast deal of poetry, are not, for that reason,
less likely to excel in poetic language. The reader will judge from
the following explanations of Gray's Hymn to Adversity, that the boy
to whom they were addressed, was not much accustomed to read even the
most popular English poetry; yet this is the same child, who a few
months afterwards, wrote the translation from Ovid, of the Cave of
Sleep, and who gave the extempore description of a summer's evening in
tolerably good language.

Jan. 1796. S---- (nin