As they grow older, and capable of more attention and patience, they grow rapidly more able to give conscious consideration to literary details. The children of fifth and sixth-grade age will linger over especially beautiful and appropriate words, will stop to realize in detail the pictures, and will consider figures long enough to appropriate them artistically. The normal child has an interesting history with regard to figures of speech. Personification he accepts at once. Indeed, it is perhaps not a figure to him, but a reality, though he seems to get out of it a conscious artistic joy. Such personification as "the daffodil unties her yellow bonnet" he can see and appreciate as figure. Metaphor is his native speech, and, so long as it involves no material beyond his power of realization, he has no trouble with it--in appreciating it or in producing it. Simile is more baffling; it is easier to go immediately and intuitively to the meaning of a metaphor than to carry in the mind the two expressed sides of the simile. The younger children are puzzled and confused by the details of a Homeric simile. But children old enough to read _Sohrab and Rustum_, if they have been taught how to hold their minds on an artistic detail, are willing to stop and appreciate the two groups of details in each of Arnold's similes. But no elementary child will make a Homeric, or indeed any simile, except as a _tour de force_. Antithesis as a striking and obvious figure is easy and illuminating to children, and seems to come to them quite spontaneously in their own composing. The more subtle figures they will neither appreciate nor use within our period. The fable as allegory and the more extended allegories, even those complex enough to be called symbolistic stories, the seventh and eighth grades in the average school will read and interpret acceptably. On the whole, we may expect to give most of the children some knowledge of the literary nature and function of simple figures, and to awaken in them an ability to enjoy and understand the figurative and allusive atmosphere characteristic of literature.