Children's songs -- United States; Games with music
We may, on the contrary, affirm that children have an especially lively
imagination. Observe a little girl who has attended her mother for
an airing in some city park. The older person, quietly seated beside
the footpath, is half absorbed in revery; takes little notice of
passers-by, or of neighboring sights or sounds, further than to cast
an occasional glance which may inform her of the child's security. The
other, left to her own devices, wanders contented within the limited
scope, incessantly prattling to herself; now climbing an adjoining
rock, now flitting like a bird from one side of the pathway to the
other. Listen to her monologue, flowing as incessantly and musically
as the bubbling of a spring; if you can catch enough to follow her
thought, you will find a perpetual romance unfolding itself in her
mind. Imaginary personages accompany her footsteps; the properties
of a childish theatre exist in her fancy; she sustains a conversation
in three or four characters. The roughnesses of the ground, the hasty
passage of a squirrel, the chirping of a sparrow, are occasions
sufficient to suggest an exchange of impressions between the unreal
figures with which her world is peopled. If she ascends, not without a
stumble, the artificial rockwork, it is with the expressed solicitude
of a mother who guides an infant by the edge of a precipice; if she
raises her glance to the waving green overhead, it is with the cry
of pleasure exchanged by playmates who trip from home on a sunshiny
day. The older person is confined within the barriers of memory and
experience; the younger breathes the free air of creative fancy.
A little older grown, such a child becomes the inventor of legend.
Every house, every hill in the neighborhood, is the locality of an
adventure. Every drive includes spots already famous in supposed
history, and passes by the abodes of fancied acquaintances. Into a land
with few traditions the imagination of six years has introduced a whole
cycle of romance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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