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    kissed his sweet eyelids , and the finch and the linnet waked him merrily with their morning songs , he arose , and went out into the green meadow . And he begged flour of the primrose , and sugar of the violet , and butter of the buttercup ; he shook dew-drops from the cowslip into the cup of a harebell ; spread out a large lime leaf , set his little breakfast upon it , and feasted daintily . Sometimes he invited a humming-bee , often a gay butterfly , to partake his feast ; but his favourite guest was the blue

    dragon fly . The bee murmured a great deal , in a solemn tone , about his riches ; but the child thought that if he were a bee , heaps of treasure would not make him gay and happy ; and that it must be much more delightful and glorious to float about in the free and fresh breezes of spring , and to bum joyously in the web of the sunbeams , than with heavy feet and heavy heart , to stow the silver wax and the golden honey into cells .

    * To this the butterfly assented ; and he told how , once on a time , he too had been greedy and sordid ; how he had thought of nothing but eating , and had never once turned his eyes upwards to the blue heavens . At length , however , a complete change had come over him ; and instead of crawling spiritless about the dirty earth , half dreaming , he all at once awaked as out of a deep sleep . And now he would rise into the air ; and it was his greatest joy sometimes to play with the light , and to reflect the heavens in the bright eyes of his wings ; sometimes to listen to the soft language of the flowers and catch their secrets . Such talk delighted the child , and his breakfast was the sweeter to him , and the sunshine on leaf and flower seemed to him more bright and cheering . * But when the bee had flown off to beg from flower to flower , and the butterfly had fluttered away to his playfellows , the dragon-fly still remained , poised on a blade of grass . Her slender and burnished body , more brightly and deeply blue than the deep blue sky , glistened in the sunbeam ; and her net-like wings laughed at the flowers because they could not fly , but must stand still and abide the wind and the rain . The dragon-fly sipped a little of the child ' s clear dew-drops and blue violet honey * and then whispered her winged words . And the child made an end of his repast , closed his dark blue eyes , and listened to the sweet prattle . '—p . 9 —14 . If the book be a good book for children ,, it is a better book for men : \ vu mean grown up men both in body and in mind . When the day ' s toils are over , in mart or study , court or senate ; when wisdom is so wise , and folly is so foolish , that it palls upon or irritates the jaded mind ; when strong faculties have been on the stretch for many hours , in the strife of business , politics , or philanthropy ;

    ' When the hurly burly ' s done , When the battle's lost and won / then let them take this book for the soul ' s refreshment and revival ; and each will have the sweeter rest , and rise , the morrow ' s morn , a purer , wiser , better , happier man . They will feel as if they had been unconsciously transported a thousand leagues from London , into a lovely , lonely , happy valley , and laid gently down on a bed of the softest moss , a transparent rill murmuring

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    7 i The Story without an End .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 72, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/74/