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Show CHILDREN A RECENT FIND Not Before the Nineteenth Century Were They Truthfully Portrayed In Literature. Children were only found yesterday. Ilefore the nineteenth century the child mind and the child heart were not supposed to have enough In them to interest the majestic adult. It Is true that you find a delightful baby In Homer; that In Virgil there Is the prettiest glimpse of a little girl, and up and down in the classics you may meet half a dozen other pleasant shadows of children. Hut they are only shadows, only at the most charming charm-ing pictures. They give you much as if they were painting or sculpture for In children's bodies art has always had Interest enough only what a, child looks like, the pretty weakness, the Instinct for play, the naive gesture ges-ture and movement. Not till the "return "re-turn to nature." not till the spirit of romance moved on the waters at the end of the eighteenth century, do you find poets beginning to tell of the thought and faith in a child's mind, the mysteries of the child's heart, the fancies (hat are dreams and the fancies fan-cies that are visions. You may think that they have gone too far, that they read Into childhood the laborious philosophizing phil-osophizing and sometimes the labored sentimentality or the adult. Hut no one who loves children will deny that the best of the children In nineteenth century books have a far richer reality, real-ity, a far fuller life than any that were born In early works. And some of Hie best are In Dickens Ixindon Tel-egrapb. |