If then it is possible for him to know intimately another child through autobiography, one more window has been opened into the child world--one more interpretative unit is given him through which to read the lesson of the whole.
It is true, autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the absolute truth of childhood.

We see our early experiences through the mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between.

It is poetry as well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the title of his own self-study.
Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best bring us into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the fact because interpretative of the spirit.
It is peculiarly necessary that teachers harassed with the routine of their work, and parents distracted with the multitude of details of daily existence, should have such windows opened through which they may look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood.
The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children.
How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot see.

Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul.

Goethe's great study of his childhood and youth must give a new hold upon life to any one who will appreciatively respond to it.
A better illustration of the subtle worth of such literature, in developing appreciation of those inner deeps of child life that escape definition and evaporate from the figures of the statistician, could scarcely be found than Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child." There is hardly a fact in the book.