Dream Children

By the Author of “ Seven Little People and their Friends.” Cambridge : Seaver & Francis.

THE children seem to have found their Dickens at last. But, of course, it was to be expected that the child’s Dickens would be different, in some important respects, from the Dickens of grown-up men and women. And so he is. Children do with the world in their thoughts pretty much as they will; and the genuine artist, working for children, must recognize this, or he will utterly fail. The author of “ Dream Children,” who made his introduction to the reading public as the author of '‘Seven Little People and their Friends,” has the rare faculty of realizing for himself the exact position and attitude of the child. This position he takes so earnestly that he has nowhere the air of assumption or arbitrary fiction. The child lives so much in pictures ! But the pictures must not betray one single feature of unreality, or the whole effect is spoiled; a moral may be pointed or a tale adorned, but the child has lost his natural food. We need such works as that under present notice to keep children from starving, — works that are not mechanically adapted to children, but which come to them as their own fresh, pure thoughts come, bringing them pictures like those which their own untrammelled fancy paints for them.

We have no space to enter into any details here. The children must do that for themselves ; but not the children alone. For, as now and then we come upon a piece of Art, a painting or a statue, which from its subject would seem to belong peculiarly to the child’s world, but which, because it is genuine Art, as to its manner and execution, rises out of this confinement to a single class, becoming universal, so it is with books of a similar character. This is true of the present work more emphatically than of the former work by the same author. The more external features of the work — its exquisite getting up, in paper, binding, and especially in illustration — are only fitting to the inherent gracefulness of the writer’s thought.

The subject is inviting, but we can only add that these short stories exhibit the rarest freshness and purity of imagination, the richest humor, and the most striking suggestion of an exhaustless fertility of invention which we remember ever to have seen in any child’s book before. There is nowhere a careless execution ; and the reason of this is probably that the characters have had a leisurely growth in the author’s own mind. Generally it is supposed, that, to suit a subject to children, it is only necessary to go through some outward manifestations and to give the thing an air of novelty ; but in this treatment there is no freshness, and no very great or very permanent moral expression. The writer of “ Dream Children” will have a select audience, but he will have it pretty much to himself, and, as the best of all rewards which he could have, he will educate the thoughts of his juvenile readers imperceptibly into a greater love and reverence for the very heart of truth and beauty.