e imaginary letters of an
imaginary Arminius (Germany in long-past happier days lent the
world these playful philosophical spirits), so the later author
invents an old village grandpapa, with the grandpapa-name of
Altegans and a prose-poem printed in scarecrow duodecimo on
paper-bag pages and entitled "Erster Schulgang," 'first
school-going,' or 'first day at school'?

The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as
it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace
in fact. All over the world--and all under it too, when their
time comes--the children are trooping to school. The great globe
swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always
morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the
morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot---
shining companies and groups, couples and bright solitary
figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about
them.

He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely
moorlands ... he sees them on the hillsides ... in the woods, on
the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the
seacliffs and on the water-ribbed sands; trespassing on the
railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in the
ferry-boats; he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities,
in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is
known only as a strange tradition.

The morning-side of the planet is alive with them: one hears
their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents
sweep `eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the
moon' ... and as new nations with _their_ cities and villages,
their fields, woods, mountains and sea-shores, rise up into the
morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet
again fresh troops of these school-going children of the dawn.

What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of
childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on
moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be
daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and
bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful picture of all, he sees them
travelling schoolward by the late moonlight which now and again in
the winter months precedes the tardy dawn.

That vision strikes me as being poetically true as well as
delightful: by which I mean that it is not sentimental: we know
that it ought to be true, that in a world we