And as it is actually constituted, the literary drama, too, represents a life and presents an art-form so complex and so mature as to be beyond a child's grasp. Not until this period is closing--and with many children not even then--comes the hour of ripeness for the drama. This question of the child and dramatic literature has so many conditions and modifications that it must be discussed at length in another chapter. But it is evident to every sympathetic student of childhood that this is not the period to present the complex situations, the difficult problems, the over-ripe experiences, that prevailingly constitute the material of literary drama. The literature we do give the children should correspond to the stage of their development in matching as nearly as may be, in tone and spirit their own activities and interests, or should be calculated to arouse in them those interests and activities they ought legitimately to have. It should be of that kind that gives a large free sweep of activity; that reveals character and conduct in their simpler, open aspects; that exhibits literary art phenomena in their plainer, more striking varieties. These qualities are to be found in chosen specimens of the three other species of literature--epic, fiction, lyric. Of course one must select from each of the three those specimens that do exhibit the qualities he seeks. He could not offer to children a developed epic in its entirety; but there are many things of the epic kind--ballads, hero-tales, fairy-sagas, certain detachable sections of the great epics themselves--precisely suited to them. We would not introduce them into a mature novel, but there are _Märchen_ for them, tales of conquest and adventure, stories of other children's doings. They would be lost and bored in the presence of the elegy or the sonnet; but we may find jingles and songs, and later on odes, fit and right for them.