Children--healthy children--never have the
poetic genius; but they are born mystics, and they have the sense of
humor. The best way to speak to them is in prose, and the best kind of
prose is the symbolic. The hermetic philosophers of the Middle Ages are
probably the authors of some of the best children's stories extant. In
these tales, disguised beneath what is apparently the simplest and most
artless flow of narrative, profound truths are discussed and explained.
The child reads the narrative, and certainly cannot be accused of
comprehending the hidden philosophical problem; yet that also has its
share in charming him. The reason is partly that true symbolic or
figurative writing is the simplest form known to literature. The simplest,
that is to say, in outward form,--it may be indefinitely abstruse as to
its inward contents. Indeed, the very cause of its formal simplicity is
its interior profundity. The principle of hermetic writing was, as we
know, to disguise philosophical propositions and results under a form of
words which should ostensibly signify some very ordinary and trivial
thing. It was a secret language, in the vocabulary of which material facts
are used to represent spiritual truths.
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