There is a picture in Lamb’s “Books for Children” [ed. E. V. Lucas], showing the ark with the animals in their symmetrically built stalls. The clouds are rolling over the waters with as much substantial outline as though they were balls of cotton; there is interest for a child in the close examination of this graphic art, which is done with that surety as though the artist had been on the spot. The reproduction was made from Stackhouse’s Bible, with which Mrs. Trimmer used to amuse her young folks on Sundays. Your wooden Noah’s Ark, with the sticky animals, was built along the same lines. Dr. Watts’s poems have been illustrated many times in similar conventional fashion. One cut in particular represented creation by a dreadful lion and a marvellous tiger, anatomically wonderful. Though parts of the Bible have been paraphrased by Dr. Watts as well as such can ever be done; though ducks and lambs and doves, symbols of simplicity, take one to the open, there is no breath of clover sweeping across the page. It is by such a beautiful cradle hymn as “Holy angels guard thy bed,” which is to be treasured with Martin Luther’s exquisite “Hymn to the Christ Child,” that this poet deserves to be remembered. Always the truest verse, the truest sentiment, the truest regard for children are detected in that retrospective tone--the eternal note of sadness, as Matthew Arnold phrases it--in which grown people speak of the realm of youth lost to them; not the sentimental stooping, not the condescending superiority,--but a yearning note brought about by the tragedy of growing up,--a yearning that passeth understanding, and that returns with every flash of the remembered child you were. The Taylors of Ongar, the two sisters, Ann (1782–1866) and Jane (1783–1824), are the poets of the didactic era; they apply to verse the same characteristics Miss More introduced in her tracts--a sympathetic feeling, but a false tenderness. They are not doctrinal in their “Original Poems for Infant Minds,” but are generally and genuinely ethical. Their attitude is different from that of Watts; they attempt to interpret feelings and impressions in terms of the child’s own comprehension. But so far were they ruled by the customary requirements of their time, that they falsely endowed the juvenile mind with the power of correlating external beauty with its own virtuous possibilities. The simplicity of Jane’s “The Violet” and “Thank you, Pretty Cow” is marked by an unnatural discrimination on the part of the children from whom such sentiments are supposed to flow; these defects detract from many a delicate verse deserving of better acquaintance than “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”