The _Child's Garden of Verses_ has now been published long enough to enable us to make a calm consideration of its merits. When it was fresh, opinion was divided, as it always is about a new strong thing, between those who, in Mr. Longfellow's phrase about the little girl, think it very, very good, and those who think it is horrid. After reading the new book, the _Underwoods_, we come back to _A Child's Garden_ with a clearer sense of the writer's intention, and a wider experience of his poetical outlook upon life. The later book helps us to comprehend the former; there is the same sincerity, the same buoyant simplicity, the same curiously candid and confidential attitude of mind. If any one doubted that Mr. Stevenson was putting his own childish memories into verse in the first book, all doubt must cease in reading the second book, where the experiences, although those of an adult, have exactly the same convincing air of candour. The first thing which struck the reader of _A Child's Garden_ was the extraordinary clearness and precision with which the immature fancies of eager childhood were reproduced in it. People whose own childish memories had become very vague, and whose recollections of their games and dreams were hazy in the extreme, asked themselves how far this poet's visions were inspired by real memory and how far by invention. The new book sets that question at rest; the same hand that gave us-- _My bed is like a little boat;_ _Nurse helps me in when I embark;_ _She girds me in my sailor's coat,_ _And starts me in the dark;_ and the even more delicious-- _Now, with my little gun, I crawl_ _All in the dark along the wall,_ _And follow round the forest-track_ _Away behind the sofa-back,--_ now gives us pictures like the following: My house, _I say. But hark to the sunny doves,_ _That make my roof the arena of their loves_, _That gyre about the gable all day long_ _And fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:_ Our house, _they say; and_ mine, _the cat declares,_ _And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;_ _And_ mine _the dog, and rises stiff with wrath_ _If any alien foot profane the path._ _So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,_ _Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;_ _Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode_ _And his late kingdom, only from the road._