Excerpt from Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Saw There
The series of Canterbury Classics aims to bear its share in acquainting school children with literature suited to their years. The culture of the imagination is no less important than the culture of memory and the reasoning power. That childhood is poor which has not for friends many of the goodly company represented by Hector, Achilles, Roland, Sigurd, My Cid, Don Quixote, Lancelot, Robin Hood, Percy, the Douglas, Gulliver, Puck, Rip Van Winkle, and Alice in Wonderland. College class-rooms, where Dante and Spenser, Goethe and Coleridge are taught, speedily feel the difference between minds nourished, from babyhood up, on myths of Olympus and myths of Asgard, Hans Christian Andersen, old ballads, the "Pilgrim's Progress," the "Arabian Nights," the "Alhambra," and minds which are still strangers to fairyland and hero-land and all the dreamlands of the world's inheritance. Minds of this latter description come almost as barbarians to the study of poetry, deaf to its music and blind to its visions. They are in a foreign clime. In the larger college of life, no less, is felt the lack of an early initiation into literature. A practical people in a practical age, we need the grace of fable to balance our fact, the joy of poetry to leaven our prose. Something of the sort we are bound to have, and if familiarity in childhood with the classic tone has not armed us against the cheap, the flimsy, the corrupt in fiction, we fall easy victims to the trash of the hour. We become the sport of those mocking elves who give dry leaves for gold.
This series must needs conform somewhat, in its choice of books, to the present demands of the schools.
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