“I think there are as many Kinds of Gardening as of Poetry”, wrote the Spectator. His own garden ran into the “beautiful Wildness of Nature”; he valued it more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly gave them fruit for their songs.[172]

Nature, regarded as a landscape gardener of more than ordinary skill, was even allowed to work under authority in the domain of poetry; but she neglected one corner of it, and there the trees were still clipped after the old fashion into “Cones, Globes, and Pyramids.” This little fenced-off portion was the eighteenth century Child’s Garden of Verses. The only way out of it was by a narrow gate in the midst of a Yew hedge, and of this only good nurses kept the key.

In the lane outside, the pedlar hawked his wares; the old ballads could still be heard, the seven lamps of enchantment burnt bright at nightfall.

But inside the garden there were curious knots, with flowers of the older sort and fragrant herbs. As time went on, some of the trees were allowed to grow as they would; the open country could be seen through gaps in the hedge, and the children began to make friends with travellers upon the road.

Good counsels had run into rhyme from the beginning, that they might hang together among wandering thoughts. Thus might the Whole Duty of a Child be remembered.[173] It gave, in short couplets, without figure, all the matter of later exemplary and cautionary verse; and since the lines were spoken in the person of the counsellor, there was a certain dramatic interest added; for he that repeated the lines assumed the part of Monitor.

This is one of the secrets of a child’s pleasure in didactic rhymes. School, dull enough in itself, becomes a live thing the moment it passes into the world of make-believe, and words of caution and authority are a delight when spoken in character.

Pedagogues and guardians of youth discovered in rhythm and rhyme a means of teaching facts otherwise unrelated. Emblem writers, feeling the weakness of their strained symbolism, clutched eagerly at an effectual prop. Emblems without verses had some measure of attraction, for if no natural correspondence seemed to exist between a hypocrite and a frog, or between an egg and a Christian,[174] the things had an interest of their own, and excited curiosity as to possible connections; but without rhymes, it would have been impossible to pair them aright.

Verse, brought as an accessory into school, twinkled a small mirror of imagination. Figures lurked in the letters of the alphabet; rhymed riddles were to be had for the piecing together of syllables. A Little Book for Little Children (1702)[175] had these elements of interest; The Child’s Week’s Work[176] was further lightened by a wide uncurtained schoolroom window, set so low that very small persons could stand a-tiptoe, and get new lessons from the creatures of earth and air. The very moderation of the writer invites acceptance:

But most of it is too good to pass by; the moral is lost in little phrases of real music, albeit the rhymer ties himself to words of one syllable:

Other “clerks” were appointed henceforth to the business of instruction. Rhymed sermons grew up in the midst of hymns of praise; these were marked by a forcible and rousing emphasis. If the voice of the Pharisee be heard no less distinctly than that of the Sluggard, in Dr. Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs[177], it rises at times into something like a glow of patriotism:

Beneath the severity which his doctrine inspired, the learned Doctor had a genuine tenderness for children, a legacy not despised by the greatest and most revolutionary of his successors, William Blake. His Cradle Hymn, beginning:

is remembered the better for Blake’s Cradle Song. In the old conventional but rhythmic fashion, he too could sing of lambs and children.

There is no answer to strictures on the more common errors of the nursery; they are so obvious that admiration halts before the power of rhythm that could give them life. Here and there comes a thought fresh turned:

The old indiscriminate approval that gave Dr. Watts a place of honour on the nursery shelf, started the echoes along two centuries. Critics could neither silence the triumphant march of the verse nor dispute a ring of sincerity that it has.

Few poets of the old-fashioned Child’s Garden failed in loyalty to its first planter; but editors made Lilliputian anthologies and filled “Poetical Flower Baskets” from other sources. Early in the new century, the author of The Butterfly’s Ball fell by his frivolous choice from the company of the elect:

He encouraged a spirit of revolt, and talking beasts of divers kinds broke into the garden.

Of the old order, John Marchant was welcome, despite his lack of originality, for a trick of rhythm which he had learnt from Dr. Watts, and apart from this, as a champion of children’s games. He had “Songs for Little Misses”, “Songs for Little Masters”, and “Songs”, varying the martial beat of Dr. Watts, on “Divine, Moral and Other Subjects”.[179]

Children, he is persuaded, would be “delighted with the Humour of them because adapted to their own Way of thinking and to the Occurrences that happen within their own little Sphere of Action.”

Stevenson could not give a more detailed picture of these “occurrences”; it is in the region of childish thought that his predecessor drifts into an uncharted sea. He knows nothing of the little mythologies of children; there are no imaginary countries, no “Unseen Playmate”, no dreams. It is the difference between the old garden and the new, which is of the child’s own planting.

There was a truant in the Babees’ Book[180] who sang:

In the years between this and Puerilia, no child was encouraged to put his own thoughts into rhyme; but Marchant’s “Little Miss” is heard “Talking to her Doll”, “Working at her Sampler”, “playing on her Spinet”, even “learning to dance”. The “little Master” of 1751 whips his top, flies his kite and goes a-birds’-nesting in verse, when he is released from Arithmetic and the Languages.

But the world of Make-believe is still unknown to grown-up travellers: a mystery jealously hidden by the child from unsympathetic eyes.

A doll, in the matter-of-fact view of Mr. Marchant, is a “mere painted piece of wood”:

The rudest image could not be such a dead thing to a child. The author is upon enchanted ground, and blind to all its wonders.

He is safer following the needle in a child’s hand, tracing the “odd and various” crochets upon a sampler, or drawing a moral from the building of a “Pasty Pye”.

To music, whether of kit or spinet, he can keep time. “Miss learning to dance”, in her saque and hooped petticoat, is a bewitching figure, and the musician, though his skill is not great, contrives not to put her out:

“Master”, watching a Puppet-show, plays Gulliver at the Court of Lilliput, surveys the “pigmy Troop” and makes appropriate reflections.

A boy’s kite carries this quaint versifier for a moment into the upper air. Even there his fancy cannot support itself; he snatches a simile for the sake of the rhyme, then takes a header to earth and fastens on his moral:

But the Kite actually rises, waving a “knotty Tail,” seeming now “a little Cloud,” now “no bigger than a Spoon”; the birds play round her or mistake her for a hawk, and the boy, were his string long enough, “would send her to the Moon.”

The rhymes of Mother Goose’s Melody and The Top Book of All were wild flowers that sowed themselves in the midst of herbaceous borders. Two garlands of folk-songs for children grew out of the same soil. The date of Gammer Gurton’s Garland is unknown.[181] A Bodleian copy in flowered covers has some rhymes from Mother Goose; but the most daring “Lulliputian” would not have chosen the fairy theme of impossible tasks:

Here, also, is the singing-game of “London Bridge,” and “A very pretty little Christmas Carol:”

Ritson reprinted Gammer Gurton, with additions, in 1810; but in the meantime an unknown editor had collected new “Songs for the Nursery”,[182] and adapted them “to favourite national Melodies”.

This is the biggest gap in the hedge. Here, at last, is the open country,—the cuckoo’s song:

the daffodil:

and the song of the North Wind:

It is even more surprising to find, in this trim garden, a nursery lyric that calls up the very spirit of child-thought:

There are no other songs like these. The Poetical Flower Basket[184] represents the Lilliputian tradition that prevailed between 1760 and 1789: rhymed fables, epigrams and inscriptions from poets who never wrote for children, and the story of “Inkle and Yarico” in verse.

Of Blake[185], it is difficult to speak in such a company. He was a winged thing hovering over little formal beds of lavender, catching for a moment an echo of children’s voices repeating the creed of “The Little Black Boy,” dropping a tear for the Chimney-Sweeper, then flying off unseen and unheard to sing his own songs of joy and love, too much a child to suffer the interruptions of other children; scarcely to be understood by those who were dreaming their own dreams under the noses of the pedagogues. A Pied Piper who never offered his services to the community; a sublime truant from every school. Of the realistic faith that could map out a Geography of Heaven, he had no knowledge; yet Laws and Moralities were the burden of some songs that had touched him. There is a magic in the simplest form of verse that may quicken the beat of a child’s heart, and endow little forgotten rules and prescriptions of the nursery with unexpected significance. If Blake could have alighted in the starlight outside a window and heard Ann Taylor putting one of her children to bed, he might have come in and acknowledged the existence of naughtiness, just for the pleasure of being forgiven. Some voices can sweeten the longest homily, and the culprit waits patiently for the kiss that must come when the sermon begins:

There is a triumphant contradiction in so tender a severity; a very rainbow of promise:

“Idle Mary” can pass it all on to her doll. Later on, when she looks down from the height of the first speaker, she understands how forgiveness and hope came with a sudden rush at the end:

The authors of the Original Poems[189] wore the laurels of Dr. Watts “with a difference.” They remembered all his tunes, they played variations on most of his themes, but they added songs of their own. In these, Walter Scott caught a note of poetry, and wrote to thank “the Associate Minstrels”. Miss Edgeworth, who cared less for rhythm, praised them for other excellences. The songs were a means of gentle intercourse between these writers and “that interesting little race, the race of children” for whom they had “so hearty an affection”.

The child of the new garden can join hands, “through the windows of this book”, with the child of the old. Ann and Jane and Adelaide were the great aunts-in-literature of Louis Stevenson. A hundred years before him they sang of stars and sun, of day and night and play in gardens. The contrast is the greater because not one or two, but all their poems turned upon “the whole Duty of Children”. Instead of following a child “up the mountain sides of dreams”, they were intent on pointing out to him a world of greater Reality.

The dream world lies all about Stevenson’s “Garden”, there is no hedge to separate it from ordinary roads and rivers; they all lead to Fairyland. Yet this most practical dreamer could speak in the very accents and call up the silhouettes of his gentle predecessors at any moment.

It is impossible to read of “The friendly cow all red and white”,[190] without thinking of Jane Taylor’s

The child in her garden looked up and wondered at one star; that other child in the hundred-years-distant garden, escaped at bedtime to watch “thousands and millions of stars”.

Who would recognise the theme of Stevenson’s “Wind” symphony, under the old title of “The Child’s Monitor”?[192] Yet the first two lines proclaim it:

The wind that brings mystery into the new Garden was an emblem of human thought in the old. Stevenson’s myth is a real product of the child mind:

There could be no such heathen explanation for Adelaide O’Keefe. The Wind took shape as an allegory in her day: it changed into the Voice of Conscience, it became an ever-watchful angel:

In another place the four elements are considered in a modestly scientific light.[193] They balance a juvenile version of The Seasons. Nature is regarded from the old didactic point of view. Spring, when “the Creatures begin their employ” invites to industry; the Idle who in Summer “love best in the shade to recline” are admonished by the active joys of haymaking; the innocent hare is remembered in the hunting season, and in Winter, Charity sits by a glowing hearth and comforts itself with the sophistries of Dr. Watts for the unequal distribution of faggots.

These are but echoes; there are many touches that give the personal records of keen and watchful eyes:

The leaf and the old man had been seen and remembered, the one for the sake of the other. There were times when Ann, in her gentle way, came very near the heart of things. The three could not have sung so well together if they had not practised different parts. Jane, comparing her own verses with the rest, modestly explained: “I allow my pieces to rank as the leaves which are, you know, always reckoned a necessary and even pleasing part of the bouquet.”

The comparison is hardly just, or if so, they are bright leaves, more striking, though fewer than the flowers.

There is a crisp touch about her simplest work. The verses are better turned than Adelaide’s or Ann’s. She is content to take her subjects from the common stock of moral tales[195], to arrange her nursery pictures in twos and fours; but in spite of convention, her “Morning” is a Reveillé:

“Evening”, the companion picture, is no more original; in due order all the properties of Morpheus move before tired eyes; sheep, and the parting linnet and the owl, the setting sun, the friendly moon that peeps through the curtain. Children know them all, and for that reason, the cradle-movement of the verse is the more soothing. Conventional portraits, “The Shepherd Boy” and “The Gleaner” stand out in clear simplicity, one on each side of the nursery mantel-piece, as “Evening” and “Morning” go over the bed. But when all the pictures are arranged, some of the figures walk out of them and begin to dance upon the floor.

“The Creatures” are never mere moral messengers. Jane has the same eye for character in beasts as in flowers or children. “The Toad’s Journal” in Q. Q. is a better example of this than any of her nursery pieces. This “venerable reptile”, supposed to have been found alive in the ruins of an Egyptian temple, records the events of his first thousand years:

The next sleep (“for a century or more”) gives time to dream; the dreamer, awakened,

It is a daring moralist who laughs at her own moral:

The moral, just because “there’s none,” presses the unspoken analogy:

To go back to the Nursery (the Original Poets were scarcely more than children when they wrote), Jane’s talking beasts quickened the old stuff of fables by a new sense of likeness and incongruity. The spider and his wife (Jane loved spiders) are as real to a child as any married couple of his acquaintance. He follows their fortunes with personal concern; he would forego a feast to dine with them:

The Cow and the Ass, meeting where the child may see them on any summer day, reconcile nonsense and natural history. The small actor can take both parts, and laughs the more at his own drollery.

Thus laughter crept into the garden under the eye of Caution and Example, and, for his coaxing ways, was allowed to stay as a probationer.

Charles and Mary Lamb wrote their Poetry for Children[196] as a task. It was probably suggested by Mrs. Godwin, anxious to rival the publishers of Original Poems. In a letter to Coleridge (June, 1809), Lamb says: “Our little poems are but humble, but they have no name. You must read them, remembering they were task-work; and perhaps you will admire the number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old Batchelor and an old Maid. Many parents would not have found so many.”

The Lambs could do nothing together without enjoying it; they could not speak in a child’s voice, and had almost forgotten the way to Babylon, but there are fewer subtleties of child-thought here than in Mrs. Leicester’s School. The verses are full of practical interests. The humour of the writers brought tenderness and delight to the “task”, and children, who are quick to catch the note of sympathy, would feel this without understanding it.

Lamb had already tried his hand at children’s rhymes. In 1805 he had written The King and Queen of Hearts[197], a careless and farcical impromptu which he sent by carrier to “Mr. Johnny Wordsworth”, begging his “acceptance and opinion”.

It is not easy to decide his exact share in Poetry for Children. The pieces reprinted in 1818[198] are not children’s poems. One of them, “To a River in which a Child was drowned”, was suggested by the translation of a Spanish ballad in Percy’s Reliques. “Love, Death and Reputation” was recognised by Swinburne as a translation from Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.

Lamb seems to have amused himself now and then by casting fragments of mature flavour into this jar of nursery simples.

Of children, but assuredly not for them is the beautiful “Parental Recollections” which suggests understanding as well as love:

Charles Lamb knew the Child that Wordsworth reverenced: the child of imagination

The verses he would have repeated in that child’s company were nonsense rhymes or metrical “wild tales”; not without a song or two from Shakespeare (after the wise example of Mother Goose); for he never could keep the things he loved best out of talk or writing.

Poetry for Children was written to fit parental ideals, just as stories were sometimes invented to accompany stock illustrations; yet Lamb’s gay humour played pranks here and there, as in the gratulatory ode, “Going into Breeches”:

And is not this a mischievous poet, that dares sympathise thus openly with nursery vanities? A dangerous man, with a tendency to romantic, unlawful sentiment. He places the revolutionary effusion between two tender and wholly innocent little poems of Mary’s.[199] It should have been pilloried instead in a column facing “George and the Chimney Sweeper”, by Adelaide O’Keefe:[200]

Here, retribution is foreshadowed in the first stanza, if a second glance be given at the title.

In another mood. Lamb could sit patient under his reverend predecessor, or give new life to an old text:

Lamb’s instincts were all against the timid doctrine of cautionary tales. A sermon is a thing that may be borne, even enjoyed, at the appointed hour; but there is no escape from regulations which cramp and restrict every natural movement. Philip is not encouraged to eschew games and concentrate on “little books”; he is not warned on promotion that all the things he wants to do are dangerous; he may play Baste the Bear, Leap-frog, Foot-ball and Cricket, he may run in the snow, he may even

If a branch will not bear his weight,