In this connection, it is a good plan occasionally during the story hour to introduce really good poetry, which delivered in a dramatic manner (far removed, of course, from the melodramatic), might give children their first love of beautiful form in verse. And I do not think it necessary to wait for this. Even the normal child of seven, though there is nothing arbitrary in the suggestion of this age, will appreciate the effect, if only on the ear, of beautiful lines well spoken. Mahomet has said, in his teaching advice: "Teach your children poetry: it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes heroic virtues hereditary." To begin with the youngest children of all, here is a poem which contains a thread of story, just enough to give a human interest: MILKING-TIME When the cows come home, the milk is coming; Honey's made when the bees are humming. Duck, drake on the rushy lake, And the deer live safe in the breezy brake, And timid, funny, pert little bunny Winks his nose, and sits all sunny. CHRISTINA ROSSETTI. Now, in comparing this poem with some of the doggerel verse offered to small children, one is struck with the literary superiority in the choice of words. Here, in spite of the simplicity of the poem, there is not the ordinary limited vocabulary, nor the forced rhyme, nor the application of a moral, by which the artist falls from grace. Again, Eugene Field's "Hushaby Lady," of which the language is most simple, yet the child is carried away by the beauty of the sound. I remember hearing some poetry repeated by the children in one of the elementary schools in Sheffield which made me feel that they had realized romantic possibilities which would prevent their lives from ever becoming quite prosaic again, and I wish that this practice were more usual. There is little difficulty with the children. I can remember, in my own experience as a teacher in London, making the experiment of reading or repeating passages from Milton and Shakespeare to children from nine to eleven years of age, and the enthusiastic way they responded by learning those passages by heart. I have taken with several sets of children such passages from Milton as the "Echo Song," "Sabrina," "By the Rushy-fringed Bank," "Back, Shepherds, Back," from "Comus"; "May Morning," "Ode to Shakespeare," "Samson," "On His Blindness," etc. I even ventured on several passage from "Paradise Lost," and found "Now came still evening on" a particular favorite with the children. It seemed even easier to interest them in Shakespeare, and they learned quite readily and easily many passages from "As You Like It," "The Merchant of Venice," "Julius Caesar," "Richard II," "Henry IV," and "Henry V."