Stories From My Attic

By the Author of “ Dream-Children.” With Illustrations. New York : Hurd and Houghton ; Cambridge : Riverside Press.

MR. SCUDDER, who has written this pretty book, has as pleasant a gift as any author we know for interesting children through their imaginative and generous side, — most people being content to take their wonder and fancy. He writes suggestively for them, as here and there an agreeable essayist or poet does for their elders ; and he has a style so charmingly simple and easy that we can no more give him up to the children than we can allow them Andersen altogether. In fact, Mr. Scudder now and then contrives to touch with that magician’s glamour our cold Yankee life (no doubt wise critics in Copenhagen talk of their cold Danish life); though he has of course not Andersen’s richness of invention. In this book he means to entertain the little ones with a light and intelligible talk about a picture of William Blake’s, some reveries of his own, then some sketches of travel, history, and biography, then some musical sketches, then a few stories, and then a romance of greater length ; and to everything he imparts a delicate gayety and kindliness of spirit, with just a little quaintness in the conceit of all, and such unaffected religiousness of feeling that there seems to be no moral there, take for a good illustration this, from “ A story that I mean to write,” about a Rocket: " I have not thought so much about the going up of the Rocket, however, as I have of the coming down; and here I mean once for all to do justice to the much-abused Rocket-stick, which is always being laughed at and treated contemptuously, as if it were its fault and not its virtue that it should come down quietly and in the dark. The Rocket-stick in my story is to be tied on patiently and to go up calmly, without having its head turned by the great fuss going on over it, and then, coming down, I mean to have it meet with a very delightful surprise. I have not yet determined what the end shall be, but rather think I shall make it come down feet foremost, and stick into the earth of some little garden, just where a sweet-pea is coming up, there to stand firmly, while the sweet-pea twines around it and covers it with its blossoms. There is to be some more ending to it, I believe; or at any rate something is to be done to prevent the sweet-pea from going to seed, and the Rocket-stick from being pulled up. I am not sure, too, but I shall have some little creature crawl up into the empty powder-horn and make a comfortable home there. At all events, our fierce, fiery Rocket, that blazes off into the sky, is to have a quiet peaceful life in the sunshine afterward. Very likely, while I am writing this story, I. shall have other thoughts in my mind, and perhaps think of that cannon in the picture, which has become a nest of birds ; of the field of wheat that waves over the battle-field ; of the men. and women who are boys and girls now.”

This is charming and suggestive writing, and it is characteristic of the book ; but the sketch is better finished than most here. Many seem mere fragments which the author wilfully or reluctantly leaves to care for themselves in the reader’s mind: others are ineffectively ended by his own hand, like “ The Enchantment of old Daniel,” which opens in a strain of singular beauty. “The Neighbors,” however, is a capital story, though the idea is old ; the cats are the best characters in it, and are very delightful cats, sitting on the edges of their respective masters’ roofs, and talking across the space between, in a dialogue of great naturalness and incoherence.

The romance of “ Rose and Rosclla,” with which Mr, Scudder closes his pleasant book, is a very lovely little romance indeed, drawn, perhaps, a little too much on air,− and thus contrasting in the widest degree with such a story as “The Neighbors,” − but containing a pretty lesson, and certain to please and teach the children, whom we could wish few better gifts than “ Stories from my Attic.”