Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading | Page 2

number of sources, and the
editor is glad to mingle with the names of the secure dwellers on
Parnassus those of some living Americans and Englishmen. He does
not pretend that he has made an exhaustive collection, but he hopes the
book may be regarded as the nucleus for an anthology which cannot, in
the nature of things, be very large.
The prose, as already intimated, is confined to groups of proverbs and
familiar sayings. In one aspect these single lines of prose present
difficulties to the young reader: they are condensed forms of expression,
even though the words may be simple; but they offer the convenient
small change of intellectual currency which it is well for one to be
supplied with at an early stage of one's journey, and they afford to the
teacher a capital opportunity for conversational and other exercises.
The order of this book is in a general way from the easy to the more
difficult, with an attempt, also, at an agreeable variety. The editor has

purposely avoided breaking up the book into lesson portions or giving
it the air of a text-book. There is no reason why children should not
read books as older people read them, for pleasure, and dissociate them
from a too persistent notion of tasks. It is entirely possible that some
teachers may find it out of the question to lead their classes straight
through this book, but there is nothing to forbid them from judicious
skipping, or, what is perhaps more to the point, from helping pupils
over a difficult word or phrase when it is encountered; the interest
which the child takes will carry him over most hard places. It would be
a capital use of the book also if teachers were to draw upon it for poems
which their pupils should, in the suggestive phrase, learn by heart. To
this purpose the contents are singularly well adapted; for, from the
single line proverb to a poem by Wordsworth, there is such a wide
range of choice that the teacher need not resort to the questionable
device of giving children fragments and bits of verse and prose to
commit to memory. One of the greatest services we can do the young
mind is to accustom it to the perception of wholes, and whether this
whole be a lyric or a narrative poem like Evangeline, it is almost
equally important that the young reader should learn to hold it as such
in his mind. To treat a poem as a mere quarry out of which a
particularly smooth stone can be chipped is to misinterpret poetry. A
poem is a statue, not a quarry.
H.E.S.
BOSTON, October, 1893.
CONTENTS.
ALPHABET Mother Goose
A DEWDROP Frank Dempster Sherman
BEES Frank Dempster Sherman
RHYMES.
Baa, baa, black sheep
Bless you, bless you, burnie bee

Bow, wow, wow
Bye, baby bunting Mother Goose

STAR LIGHT Unknown
THE LITTLE MOON A.B. White
TO A HONEY-BEE Alice Gary
RHYMES.
A cat came fiddling
A dillar, a dollar
As I was going
to St. Ives
As I was going up Pippen Hill
A swarm of bees in May
Mother Goose
PROVERBS AND POPULAR SAYINGS
NONSENSE ALPHABET Edward Lear
THE EGG IN THE NEST Unknown
RHYMES
Hey! diddle diddle
Pussy sits beside the fire
Ding
dong bell Mother Goose
DAISIES Frank Dempster Sherman
SPINNING TOP Frank Dempster Sherman
PROVERBS AND POPULAR SAYINGS
RHYMES.
Bobby Shafto's gone to sea
Every lady in this land

Great A, little a
Hark, hark
Sing a song of sixpence
Hickory,
dickory dock
Hot-cross buns!
How does my lady's garden grow?

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree-top

Some little mice sat in a barn to spin
If all the world were apple-pie

If wishes were horses
I have a little sister Mother
Goose
WHO STOLE THE BIRD'S NEST? Lydia Maria Child
RHYMES.
I saw a ship a-sailing
Jack and Jill went up the hill

Little Bo-peep
Little boy blue
Little girl, little girl
Little Jack

Horner sat in the corner
Little Johnny Pringle had a little pig
Little
Miss Muffet
There was a little man
Little Tommy Tacker Mother
Goose PROVERBS AND POPULAR SAYINGS
HAPPY THOUGHT Robert Louis
Stevenson
THE SUN'S TRAVELS Robert Louis
Stevenson
MY BED IS A BOAT Robert Louis Stevenson
THE SWING