The answer to all these questions is simple, but like most simple things, it goes deep into the heart of life. We live in a rhythmical world, a rhythmical universe. The stars in their courses, the seasons, the tides and waves of the sea, the beat of the human heart, even the measured pace of a horse's sounding hoofs on the road, or a carpenter's unconscious hammer on the new house across the way, -- all these elements, great and small, are moving in accordance with a great natural law, the law of rhythm, of stress. Now a child is a natural creature; he comes into the world intensely, unconsciously subject to the laws of all being, which are the laws of his being. One of the greatest of these laws is that of rhythm,, So the child, when he meets one of his first human problems, -- the relation of speech, of words, to thought, -- takes rather more naturally to rhythmic expression than to prose.
"Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home."
One of these clouds which the child brings with him is his love for rhythmical sound; and this love is satisfied by music or verses. "Poetry," says Wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." Just think a moment how much that means when you put it beside the fact that your little boy or girl loves:
"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe."
It means that he has, working dimly within him, together with all the other great forces of nature's laws, this law of rhythm. If you are to educate him aright, you must remember that his love for a musical child-rhyme goes deep into the great spiritual meanings of his life, and is fraught with great possibilities for his future, and through his future, for the better race of men to come.
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