from The Judge, October 27, 1917

THE WIZARDS

ALL children are poets. Their minds are great wells of imaginative fancy. Their little heads are fairy caves. Their eyes are the windows of a palace of magic delights.

They do not see the external world as it is, but as they modify it. A house is not a house to them, but is the abode of a goblin or a fairy.

Strange beings dwell in everything. Everything has a soul, and you cannot make a child believe otherwise. Their imagination creates life where life is not; they infuse into each inanimate object the superabundance of their own minds.

They relate the most extravagant stories with an air of truth. It is their truth. To them their dreams and visions are the only real things in life. They have no use for a cheerless, stupid fact. Their minds carry a finer secret.

Yes, a secret! A great secret! A marvellous secret is theirs! They live in a Kingdom of Secrets which we older ones, world-weary and task-laden, can never enter.

They—the smiling children with the dreamy faces—have the key to the door of Truth. It is they who see behind the masks that things wear; it is their newer souls that see things truly.

The craving for tales of adventure, for romance, the thirst for fiction of all kinds are the attempts of the grown human being to force entrance once again into that Palace of Endless Delight—the mind of the child.

—Benjamin De Casseres.