The Child in the Garden is an only child, a lonely child, and a very individualistic child; there is no comradeship in the verses; they cannot be becomingly recited in concert; there is not a chorus or a refrain in the whole book, in which all the children may join; there is nothing communal about them. In spite of all the efforts, they cannot be set to music, except as solos; and if the music matches the mood, it is likely to be difficult for a child to sing. Several of them are too imaginative--"Windy Nights," "Shadow March;" some are a bit ironic--"Good and Bad Children," "System," "A Happy Thought;" some too poignantly pathetic--"The Land of Nod;" some look at childhood too obviously with the man's eyes--"Keepsake Mill;" but all these exceptions leave many altogether suitable for children; and their perfect structure, their musical verse-form, their childlike objectivity, and the divine simplicity of their style render them an unceasing delight. Though the Child of the Garden was a solitary child, he had a constantly haunting sense of the world beyond--other children in other lands, the foreign countries he might see by climbing higher, the children who would bring his boats ashore far down the river, the children singing in far Japan, the long-ago Egyptian boys, hints at the wider experience and bigger world to which the six- and seven-year-old children are so eagerly reaching out. At the same time nobody but Stevenson--nobody at least, that has written a book--has ever taken adequately the point of view of the human being three feet high--his tiny horizon, the small exquisite objects to which he comes close, the fairy-dells he sees, the rain-pool sea, the clover tree; nowhere else in art is the little world of the little people adequately pictured--the little world, and its obverse, the colossal grown-ups, with their elephantine furniture amidst which the little men and women must ordinarily move. Many of these poems should be read with the single child at home. For the class at school we may use "Foreign Lands," "Singing," "Where Go the Boats," "My Shadow," "The Swing," "My Ship and I"--the more objective and universal of them.