The best of all
children's books--"Grimm's Fairy Tales" itself--takes no deeper hold
upon the youthful mind. Mr. Kipling's genius which in his other work
is constantly "dropping bricks" as the expressive phrase has it, and
running amuck through strenuous banalities, rises in the Jungle-Book
to heights of poetic and imaginative suggestion which will give him an
undying position among the great writers of our race.
91. CHARLES L. DODGSON. ALICE IN WONDERLAND. _The edition with the
original illustrations_.
It would be ridiculous to compile a list of a hundred best books and
leave out this one. Lack of space alone prevents us from including
"Through the Looking Glass" too.
"Alice" is after all as much of a classic now and by the same right,
the right of a universal appeal, to every type of child, as Mother
Goose of the Nursery Rhymes. She had only to appear--this
slender-legged, straight-haired, Early-Victorian little prude, to
enter at once the inmost arcana of the temple of art. The book is a
singular evidence of what the power of a desperate devotion can do--a
devotion like this of Mr. Dodgson to all little girls--when a certain
whimsical genius belongs to the possessed by it.
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