As for dancing, Richter exclaims: "I know not whether I should most
deprecate children's balls or most praise children's dances. For the
harmony connected with it (dancing) imparts to the affections and the
mind that material order which reveals the highest, and regulates the
beat of the pulse, the step, and even the thought. Music is the meter
of this poetic movement, and is an invisible dance, as dancing is a
silent music. Finally, this also ranks among the advantages of his
eye and heel pleasure; that children with children, by no harder canon
than the musical, light as sound, may be joined in a rosebud feast
without thorns or strife." The dances may be of the simplest kind,
such as "Ring Around a Rosy," "Here We Go, To and Fro," "Old Dan
Tucker" and the "Virginia Reel." The old-fashioned singing plays, such
as "London Bridge," "Where Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow," and
"Pop Goes the Weasel" have their place and value. Several collections
of them have been made and published, but usually quite enough
material may be found for these plays in the memories of the people of
any neighborhood.
[Sidenote: Toys]
All these plays, it will be noticed, call for very simple and
inexpensive apparatus, in most cases for no apparatus at all.
Nevertheless there is a place for toys. All children ought to have
a few, both because of the innocent pleasure they afford and because
they need to have certain possessions which are inalienably their own.
A simple and inexpensive list of suitable toys adapted to various ages
is given at the end of this section. Most of them are exactly the toys
that parents usually buy. But it will be noticed that none of them are
very elaborate or expensive, and that the patrol wagon is not among
them. This is because the patrol wagon directly leads to plays that
are not only uneducational but positively harmful in their tendencies.
The children of a whole neighborhood were once led into the habit of
committing various imitation crimes for the sake of being arrested
and carried off in miniature patrol wagon. It any such expensive and
elaborate toys are bought, it may well be the plain express wagon or
the hook and ladder and fire engine. The first of these leads to plays
of industry, the second to those of heroism.
LIST OF TOYS SUITABLE FOR VARIOUS AGES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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