Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, or Robert Louis Stevenson, as the world
knows him, was still a boy when he published this rare volume of "A
Child's Garden of Verses," although by the calendar he was thirty-five
years old. You and I have sighed, no doubt, to be a boy again, but here
was one who, while he outgrew his knickerbockers, never outgrew the quick
sympathy, the brave heart, the fresh outlook, the confident faith and
buoyant spirit of the little Scotch boy who roamed the hills 'round
Edinburgh. Better than any man of any time he was able to enter into the
heart of a boy, to view things with a boy's eyes, and to write of them in
simple verse, touched with the warmth and color of his rich imagination.
In these "Verses" he writes as a child rather than about children, and in
this lies much of the charm which they possess for little readers. There
is in them the surprise of reality, the beauty of a simple rhythm, and the
mysterious flavor of magic that grips a boy's heart and will not let him
go until the book has become a part of him. Surely this is a rare quality
in schoolbooks.
The Stevensons had been famous engineers for more than a hundred years,
building lighthouses along the Scottish coast, and it was natural that his
father should have expected Robert Louis to follow in the family
footsteps. But the slim boy with brown eyes, who at eight had written a
"History of Moses," and illustrated it with his own pen; who was slow to
learn from books, but quick to understand things that he saw and felt; the
boy who carried a volume of history in one pocket and a notebook in
another, had other plans for himself, and even his father came to see the
wisdom of his son's choice of a literary life. As early as 1873, when
only twenty-three years old, Stevenson was ordered south for the winter by
his physician, to ward off impending consumption. For more than twenty
years, or until his death in Samoa late in 1894, he was never far from
this pursuing enemy. It followed him over tossing seas and through many
lands as he journeyed in search of health; yet through all these years he
carried a brave and happy heart, and wrote at the end this Requiem, the
last three lines of which are upon his tomb on the mountain-top in Samoa;
"Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
"This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."
Robert Louis Stevenson's first book, "An Inland Voyage," was published in
1878, when he was twenty-eight years old, and is a fresh and charming
account of a canoe trip up the rivers of Holland. It was during this
journey that he wrote: "If we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or
if God sent around a drum before the hawthorn came into flower, what a
work we should make about their beauty! But these things, like good
companions, stupid people early cease to observe."
The next year came his "Travels With a Donkey," which told in the same
naïve style the story of his journey through the Cevennes Mountains with
no other companion than a donkey, whose gait he describes as being "As
much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run."
He first visited America in 1879, in search of health, returning in 1880
to Scotland with Mrs. Stevenson, whom he had married in California. In
1887 he came again with the hope that a dry winter in the Adirondack
Mountains would stand off the hand of Death. But he was little benefited,
and took up his search for health by chartering a yacht for a voyage
through the South Seas. It was on this trip that he fell in love with the
beauty of the scenery and the healthful climate of Samoa, and in 1890 he
took up his home there, never again to leave the island except for
occasional visits to Honolulu and Sydney. And when the time came for him
to die, the natives, with their knives and axes cut a path up the steep
mountain-side and carried him on their broad shoulders to his grave on the
mountain-top.
"A Child's Garden of Verses" was first published in London in 1885, and
long ago became a children's classic; yet it is now for the first time
made available as a supplementary reader for the primary grades in a
suitable form and at a possible price. There have been many and beautiful
editions, but they have all appealed to "grown-ups" rather than to boys
and girls to whom the book really belongs. To put such a book, with its
simple style, its wise observations, its kindly sympathy, and fanciful
humor into the hands of a boy or girl, is not only to make him happy, it
is to start him on the straight path to culture.
This volume contains all the poems originally appearing under the title "A
Child's Garden of Verses." The poems grouped under "The Child Alone,"
"Garden Days," and "Envoys" have been omitted, as many of them are too
philosophical to be understood by children in the primary grades.
The illustrations in this book are used by special arrangement with Harper
& Brothers of New York City, who publish the complete "Verses" in a
beautiful edition suitable for the home or the library.
So with Stevenson's own words the book is yours:
"Go little book, and wish to all,
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore."
E. O. G.
For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:
For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore:—
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life—
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!
And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!
R. L. S.
| PAGE |
| By Way of Introduction | 5 |
| To Alison Cunningham | 8 |
| Bed in Summer | 13 |
| Young Night Thought | 15 |
| Rain | 16 |
| My Shadow | 17 |
| Time To Rise | 20 |
| At the Seaside | 21 |
| Windy Nights | 22 |
| Pirate Story | 24 |
| Whole Duty of Children | 27 |
| Foreign Lands | 28 |
| System | 30 |
| A Good Play | 32 |
| The Land of Counterpane | 33 |
| A Good Boy | 34 |
| Looking Forward | 36 |
| The Swing | 37 |
| Good and Bad Children | 38 |
| Marching Song | 40 |
| Travel | 42 |
| Where Go the Boats? | 46 |
| Escape at Bedtime | 48 |
|
| From a Railway Carriage | 50 |
| The Wind | 52 |
| Auntie's Skirts | 54 |
| Happy Thought | 55 |
| The Cow | 56 |
| My Bed Is a Boat | 58 |
| The Land of Nod | 60 |
| Fairy Bread | 61 |
| Keepsake Mill | 62 |
| Winter-time | 64 |
| Looking-glass River | 66 |
| The Sun's Travels | 69 |
| The Lamplighter | 70 |
| Foreign Children | 73 |
| The Moon | 74 |
| The Hayloft | 77 |
| Farewell To the Farm | 78 |
| A Thought | 80 |
| Singing | 81 |
| North-west Passage |
| I. Good-night | 82 |
| II. Shadow March | 84 |
| III. In Port | 86 |
| To My Mother | 88 |
| Guide To Pronunciation | 89 |
| A Word List | 90 |
A Child's Garden
LOUIS
E. MARS
CHICAGO
LONDON
Made in U.S.A.
