is not theories of child life but appreciation of children.
How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her
girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot
see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories
in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal
discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul. Goethe's great
study of his childhood and youth must give a new hold upon life to any
one who will appreciatively respond to it.

A better illustration of the subtle worth of such literature, in
developing appreciation of those inner deeps of child life that escape
definition and evaporate from the figures of the statistician, could
scarcely be found than Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child." There is hardly
a fact in the book. It tells not what the child did or what was done to
him, but what he felt, thought, dreamed. A record of impressions through
the dim years of awakening, it reveals a peculiar and subtle type of
personality most necessary to understand. All that Loti is and has been
is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child. Exquisite sensitiveness
to impressions whether of body or soul, the egotism of a nature much
occupied with its own subjective feelings, a being atune in response to
the haunting melody of the sunset, and the vague mystery of the seas,
a subtle melancholy that comes from the predominance of feeling over
masculine power of action, leading one to drift like Francesca with the
winds of emotion, terrible or sweet, rather than to fix the tide of the
universe in the centre of the forceful deed--all these qualities are in
the dreams of the child as in the life of the man.

And the style?--dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with
its exquisite music, wakening sad reveries, and hinting of gray days of
wind and rain, when the gust around the house wails of broken hopes and
ideals so long-deferred as to be half forgotten,--the minor sob of his
music expresses the spirit of Loti as much as do the moods of the child
he describes.

Such a type, like all others, has its strength and its weakness. Such a
type, like all others, is implicitly in us all. Do we not know it--the
haunting hunger for the permanence of impressions that come and go,
which pulsates through the book till we can scarcely keep back the
tears; the brooding over the two sombre mysteries--Death and Life (and
which is the darker?); the sense of f