A Child's Garden of Verses

By Way of Introduction

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.