Page:Roads to Childhood (1920).pdf/127

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CHILDREN UNDER TEN
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twelve; and lived and worked long enough in the gardens of England to carry about with him a rare love of flowers, an expert knowledge of plant life in all its varying forms, and a deep appreciation, born of his own hunger for beauty in boyhood, of the place of nature in any form of education of children. He shared with us the desire to reflect in the children’s library of a great city the life of the woods, the streams, the meadows, the hillsides and gardens of a more spacious childhood.

Very early in our work of satisfying children with books, we had discovered how many of the stories and poems known and loved by us as children were meaningless to children who had never seen the country in springtime, and whose parents seemed to have forgotten their childhood. The “nature study” of the schools was as yet unfortified by botanical specimens, or by the expanding resources of the Children’s Museum of Brooklyn.

“We have been listening to a poet,” we told the children on that St. Patrick’s Day, “a poet who says there are still fairies in

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