Did I write this book?
What then made me do it?
In reading a volume of Fors Clavigera I once came upon a passage which sounded well but left me in a mist, and it relieved me to find a footnote to it in which the author says: "This passage was written many years ago and what I was thinking about at the time has quite escaped my memory.

At all events, though I let it stand, I can find no meaning in it now." Little men may admire but must not try to imitate these gestures of the giants.

And as a result of a little quiet thinking it over I seem able to recover the idea I had in my mind when I composed this child's story and found a title for it in Blake.

Something too of the semi-wild spirit of the child hero in the lines: "Naught loves another as itself....
And, father, how can I love you Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little birds That pick up crumbs about the door." There nature is, after picking up the crumbs to fly away.
A long time ago I formed a small collection of children's books of the early years of the nineteenth century; and looking through them, wishing that some of them had fallen into my hands when I was a child I recalled the books I had read at that time--especially two or three.

Like any normal child I delighted in such stories as the Swiss Family Robinson, but they were not the books I prized most; they omitted the very quality I liked best--the little thrills that nature itself gave me, which half frightened and fascinated at the same time, the wonder and mystery of it all.