By such an experiment, however, one begins to realise how rich the field of juvenile energy is--a stream of voluntary desire seeking some course to the sea. From a multitude of such letters one may comprehend why the librarian insists on proceeding slowly in order to counteract deficiencies. The newsboy, without his five-cent weekly, still must have his penny-dreadful classic; the girl, too old for the juvenile book, must be furnished with a transitional book on the way to the grown-up shelves; our foreign children must be encouraged to read, according to the librarian’s idea, something different from themselves, something not of their own environment.[57] We were warned by the writer in the _Quarterly Review_ not to regard the extremes of genius or of dulness, in estimating children. And yet, biography is filled with that appealing detail of juvenile taste, which the grown person delights in recording. Lamb’s remembrance of the Stackhouse Bible, Coleridge’s dreamy dread of the Arabian Nights, Scott’s lusty shouting of the ballad of Hardy Knute, Tennyson’s spreading his arms to the sky and chanting, “I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind,” Stevenson’s crooning to himself in the dark his “songstries”[58]--these touches do not betoken the genius of men, but the genius of childhood. Whenever we find such young people brought in contact with children’s literature, they do not relish the experience; they recognise as of value only that which they can but partially comprehend, yet which is told out of the depths of a writer’s heart and understanding. They respond to the spirit of great literature from their earliest moments; for its sake, they overcome the sensitiveness of temperament which nowadays must be in so far reckoned with that all causes for fear are rejected from a story. To them, there is a certain educative value in fear. Coleridge, timourous as he was when not more than six, devoured the gilt-covered books of Jack-the-Giant-Killer and of Tom Hickathrift, whom Thackeray delighted in, not because he was so tall, but because he was so _thick_; and though it is said that his father burnt many of these nerve-exacting tales, we hear Coleridge exclaiming during the course of a lecture delivered in 1811: “Give me the works which delighted my youth! Give me the History of St. George and the Seven Champions of Christendom, which at every leisure moment I used to hide myself in a corner to read! Give me the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, which I used to watch, till the sun shining on the book-case approached, and, glowing full upon it, gave me the courage to take it from the shelf.”[59]