Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[333] after all, is the grace of the phrase, and that even if a collection of good English sentences would not answer as well (because he is not forced to dwell on them for the purpose of translation), yet some German or French phrase-book, provided it were not Ollendorff, might serve the purpose. I should be the last person to deny the magic that may also dwell, for young people, in a book like Miss Austen's “Selections from German prose writers,” which at a later period I almost learned by heart. But however we may define the words “classic” and “romantic,” it will be found, I think, however contrary to the impression of many, that the child is naturally a classicist first. Emerson said well, “Every healthy boy is a Greek” ; while his powers are dawning and he divides his life between games and books, he prefers phrases that, while they touch his imagination, have yet a certain definite quality. A Greek statue, a Latin line, reach him and stay with him; he likes them as he likes Scott, for the vivid picture. He must grow a little older, must look before and after; the vague sense of a dawning destiny must begin just to touch him; he must gaze into a maiden's eyes, and begin to write long reveries in his journal, and fancy himself “so young, yet so old,” before Germany can fully reach him. To the German was given “the powers of the air,” but the boy dwells on earth; for him the very gods must be, like those of the Greeks and Romans, men and women. He is poetic, but it is according to Milton's definition, “simple, sensuous, passionate” ; the boy's poetry is classic, it is the youth only who is romantic. Give him time enough, and every castle on the Rhine will have for him a dream, and every lily of the Mummelsee an imprisoned maiden; but his earlier faith is in the more definite dramatis personae of