Now, one would hasten to add that there are children in every class, and it may be in every family--unimaginative, matter-of-fact, commonplace children--who need to have given them, and to learn to enjoy, if possible, the mere vagaries and haphazard inventions; and it would be a pity to deprive any child of them in his hours of intellectual play. But it is from his contact, frequent and deep, with the more artistic and ordered bits of literature that we may expect the child to find that special cultivation of the imagination, the power of seeing an organized imaginative whole; and out of this experience should grow the further power, so important in this stage of his education--that of grasping, and constructing out of his own material, such complete and ordered wholes. Another way in which the imagination works in literature is of peculiar importance, for the children. This, too, is precisely one of those characteristics that distinguish literature from everything else. It lies in the fact that, unlike other kinds of writing, literature proceeds by the presentation of concrete, specific details, the actual image, or images, combined into a definite picture, elevated from the world of actuality to the plane of art, or created on that plane out of details gathered from any source. In proportion as we find in literature abstract thinking, statement of general truth or plain fact, facsimile description or mere sentimentalizing, in that proportion do we find it dull and inartistic. "The orange is a reddish-yellow semi-tropical fruit," is a statement of fact plain and scientific. It would be so inartistic as to be absurd in a line of poetry. "Among the dark boughs the golden orange glows," lifts the object into the world of art, sets it in a picture, even gives it to us in the round, makes it moving and vital. "The foxglove blooms centripetally," one may say as dry fact, but when the poet says The fox-gloves drop from throat to top A daily lesser bell,