Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

“ Three hours have passed in which over thirty children, barely out of babyhood, have worked incessantly at many different occupations, have moved gracefully and with complete freedom about the room, have changed occupations as often as they wished, have not once quarreled. But now, out of the ordered disorder, comes a marvelous hush. No word is spoken, but one baby after another, glancing the written sign, drops back with closed eyes into a hushed silence in which the whir of bird wings in the garden, the fluttering of casement hangings, the far-away sound of a bell are audible. ”

“ Every one knew that she was a princess because she wandered all day through the castle without doing any work. It was a very busy kingdom indeed even if it was so tiny. It was only about two inches high above the meadow, not nearly as tall as the grass blades that grew all around it. The grass looked like a forest of trees to the little red princess, and a wild forget-me-not that bent down over the castle made her sky, for it was almost as blue and nearly as large to her wee eyes. ”

“ Every child knows toys, a birthday, a play-room, a city street in the rain, a kitchen; but out of these patches of gray, every-day pigment Andersen paints for children a new, colored picture of fancy. Presented in terms of the real we have the unreal; a live tin soldier who is as heroic and faithful as we wish our children to be. This is a perfect imaginative story, a bit of unreality which we wish to make real for children and told in terms of child experience.
Alice Brown’s wonderful allegory, “The Gradual Fairy,” is also perfect in its theme and construction. ”

“ When the grove was empty and still, all the other Dryads would step softly from their dwelling places in the cypress, the olive and the pine trees and join hands as they danced lightly about the oak tree, singing their praises of the great Ceres who fed with her bounty the whole of Greece. The country people, and even those from the cities, came to pay their homage to Ceres' oak, bringing garlands of roses and laurel that they hung on its boughs, and carving messages of thanks and love for the Dryad on its bark. ”

“ We will make gardening a means of leading our little ones to observe the phenomena of life, to be patient in waiting for that life to manifest itself, and to be very sure in the hope that fruition will come.
Does your little Andrea, your child who has come to you with such a divine curiosity about life and so quick a sense to feel it, have a chance to be, himself, a part of the miracle by helping something to grow? To plant a seed, to surround it with all the best conditions for growth, to tend it, to wait for its flowerings—this is Montessori development possible for any child. ”

“ Once upon a time everything in the woods was covered deep with snow, the berries, the juicy young bushes, and the roots. The animals had stowed themselves away for the winter to sleep; the bear in a deep cave, the chipmunk in a hollow log, and the wild mouse in a cozy hole beneath the roots of a tree. The wind sang a high, shrill song in the tops of the pine trees, and the doors of the wigwams were shut tight.
But the door of Son-of-a-Brave’s wigwam suddenly opened a little way and the Indian boy, himself, looked out. He had his bow and a newly tipped arrow in his hands. ”

“ The sails of the windmills whirred, and the housewives scrubbed their sidewalks until the stones were clean enough to eat from. The storks built again in the red chimneys and, everywhere, the tulips burst into bloom. Love had never seen such beautiful flowers in all her life. There was no garden in all Amsterdam so small or so poor as not to have a bed of bright red and yellow tulips.
With the first sunshine, Love went out to the garden where she and Jan had planted the ugly, hard bulb. How wonderful; her patience had been rewarded! ”

“ So the Star-Child was brought up with the children of the Woodcutter, and sat at the same board with them, and was their playmate. And every year he became more beautiful to look at, so that all those who dwelt in the village were filled with wonder. While they were swarthy and black-haired, he was white and delicate as ivory, and his curls were like the rings of the daffodil. His lips, also, were like the petals of a red flower, and his eyes were like violets, and his body like a narcissus of a field where the mower comes not. ”

“ Diana, the huntress, was now Diana, the moon, the queen of the darkness and shedding her light on the laurel tree that her brother, Apollo, the god of the sun, loved so much.
The frogs along the river bank croaked harshly and could not understand any of these wonders that had come to pass right beside them. They had missed a wonder when they were rustics, too. There are some people like that. They, too, would see only a ragged, weary stranger with her tired babies, not worth the trouble of helping, when those little ones might be an Apollo and a Diana, the gods of the day and the night. ”

“ The hunger of Raffaelo was fed.
Every child is color hungry. Your child may be a painter in the making, heir to a century-old talent that somebody had to bury, but which would not die and rose and haunted. Or he may be an average child who will be happier and better all his life if he can see each fine gradation of color that tints the sunset and can feed his soul on a beautiful Titian or a Fra Angelico. ”

“ Then Ibbity looked up at the sky, and he called loudly to the sun:
“Oh, great Sun, the tree threw Ibbity, the wind broke the tree, the hill stops the wind, the mouse tunnels the hill, the tiger catches the mouse, the rope catches the tiger, the fire burns the rope, but your heat is greater than that of the fire. Are you not the strongest one?” ”

“ It would be better to tell a child as a plain statement of a universal fact that the cold mercifully kills the plant that has served its use of reproduction of species that it may make way for another season’s cycle of buds and blooms, than to tell a story about Jack Frost who, airily attired in white, skips about the garden and puts the flowers to sleep. ”

“ The school was hushed, though, as the Dame who taught it entered and took her seat behind the desk, a quaint figure in her black gown, white apron, great spectacles and smoothly-parted back hair. All the children of these old Colony days, seated in front of her on the hard benches, bent their heads low again over their spellers or slates. Their hair was smoothly cropped or tightly braided. Only the wayward little girl, perched high upon the dunce’s stool, wore her hair in a mass of tangled curls. They gleamed like gold in the sunshine that filtered in through the window. ”

“ All the wild dances he knew: the swift dance in a red mantle with the autumn, the light dance in blue sandals over the corn, the dance with white snow wreaths in the winter, and the blossom dance through the orchards in the spring. The Infanta would love his forest friends, too, the rabbits that scurried about in the fern, the hedgehogs that could curl themselves up into prickly balls, and the great wise tortoises that crawled slowly about, nibbling the leaves and shaking their heads. ”

“ Mario’s mother, his wise old grandmother, the canny fruit seller,—none of them had known how blurred the world looks to the eyes of a little child. Many mothers are not able to see with the eyes of a child. We grown-ups who comprehend a beautiful landscape, a lovely fresco, a piece of miracle machinery, a fragile porcelain vase, a statue, an immortal pile of architecture instantaneously, analyzing the form that makes the beauty, never stop to think how we grasp it, mentally. ”

“ As she reached the meadow, the river god, whispering to her through the rushes, warned her.
"Do not venture among the flock while the sun shines on them," he told her. "In the heat of the rising sun, the rams burn with a cruel rage to destroy mortals with their sharp teeth. Wait until twilight, when you will find their woolly gold sticking to the bushes and the trunks of the trees."
The compassion of the river god helped Psyche to do as Venus had commanded her and she returned to the temple in the evening with her arms full of golden fleece. ”

“ The children who had been gathering wild flowers ran, crying, to their fathers and mothers, for the sky was darkened in an instant as if a hurricane was approaching. The young men who had been playing games and the maidens who had been dancing huddled together in frightened groups, for they saw between rifts in the clouds the tracks of dark chariot wheels making their swift way down to earth from the sky. ”

“ So the toad and all his brothers, who had been hiding beneath the stones of the field that they might not be killed, came out, and tended the field. They ate the insects and other creatures that would have destroyed the sprouts, and so the field grew.
It lay in the sunshine, bright with flowers, and green with the sprouts of growing food and trees.
"A fertile field!" said the farmer. "I shall help it to grow."
"The field is alive!" cried the children. "We can go in it and help the farmer."
"The field is rich!" said all the people who lived near by. "It is growing, and will help us to live." ”

“ He was very tall and straight, and wore the beautiful, rich costume of the Colonies. His velvet knee breeches, silver-buckled shoes, gold-embroidered coat, and white wig showed Betsy that he was a personage of importance. But he stood before her with his three-cornered hat in his hand and bowed to her quite as if she had been a young lady.
“Good morning, little lass of Salisbury,” he said in his deep, kind voice, pointing to her sewing. “You are an industrious child, such an one as I like to see growing up in this new land. You work betimes in the day, and with the birds.” ”

“ If we suffocate children’s activities, we suffocate their lives. The good child is not the quiet, inactive child. The perfect child is not the child who is nearest like man.
The only way to keep a child still is to teach him orderly movement. The only way to keep him from handling our things is to give him educational things of his own to handle.
It is a more fascinating home occupation than any which you ever attempted, this Montessori way of observing your child. He is your own life flower, a bud, now, but with the power of sure, beautiful unfolding into bloom. ”

“ How Atalanta could run! There had never been a boy even who was able to beat her in a race. The breezes seemed to give her wings, her bright hair blew over her shoulders, and the gay fringe of her dress fluttered behind her. But as Atalanta raced, the ruddy hue of her skin seemed to fade and she became as white as marble, for her heart grew cold. All her suitors were outdistanced and they were put to death without mercy.
Then Hippomenes came and decided to risk his life in a race with Atalanta. ”

“ Montessori points to us a miracle. Dovetailing instinct and habit and perception, the child intellect begins to build. Clear percepts become concepts; mental images become ideals, imagination appears, building from the clay of everyday-mind stuff a golden castle of dreams.
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Imagination cannot be taught. It can scarcely be defined. It can never be prescribed and trained. It is that flowering of the mind processes by means of which a bit of brown sod appears tinted with light and color to the artist, full of potentialities of growth to the gardener, smells of home to the wanderer. ”

“ But the toy soldier, who sat on a cabinet, suddenly spoke.
"I can't bear it any longer," he said. "The days are so dull and the evenings are still duller. Here it is not at all like your home, where your father and mother talk so pleasantly, and you and the other children make such a delightful noise."
"Oh, you mustn't mind that," said the little boy. "This house is full of old thoughts that come and visit and bring much company with them."
"I see nothing of them, and I don't know them because I am new," said the toy soldier. "I cannot bear it!" ”

“ So King Midas acquired a farm and took his court there, becoming a worshipper of Pan, the goat-footed god of the fields.
The god Pan was the merriest and almost the best beloved of all the gods, for his domain was the whole of the beautiful, wide outdoors. He was a wanderer of the mountains and valleys through all the seasons, peering into the grottos where the shepherds lived, amusing himself by chasing the nymphs, and bringing laughter and merriment wherever he went. The stump of a tree with its shaggy roots was Pan's pillow and the dusky leaves his only shelter. ”

“ It seemed as if all the loveliness of the world in this, its story time, was hers. Her [142] hair was bright with the yellow of the first spring sunshine, and her eyes were as blue as the skies of spring. Summer had touched Deïanira's cheeks with the pink of rose petals, and the colors of the autumn fruits shone in her jewels, crimson, and purple, and gold. Her robes were as white and sparkling as the snows of winter, and all the music of soft winds, and bird songs, and rippling brooks was in this princess' voice. ”