Excerpt from A Child's Garden of Verses The greatest task which confronts the little Child is the mastering of the mother tongue in its three phases Speech, reading, and writing. In the accomplishment Of this task, nothing is so helpful as the hearing and reading Of large quantities of suitable poetry. This fact was well known to the people of antiquity. Before the age Of writ ing, the laws and traditions Of each tribe were handed down through the medium of verse. Verse was Chosen rather than prose, because its form facilitated memorizing and furnished a guarantee of accuracy. When the law or tradition had been once thrown into the poetic form it was difficult to Change its meaning without destroying its form and this would at once furnish a test of correctness. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.