The Wind in the Willows
There aren’t very many people who can sing out to us, “Come and play!”, with that right alluring utterance that makes us cast aside our workaday concerns and fare forth again adventurous as in the wonder-years before we left off trailing clouds of glory. When Tusitala died, and the swarthy-skinned Samoans buried him beneath the wide and starry sky on the summit of that mountain, aloof above the huge pacific seas, whose pines are evermore made musical by singing birds, it looked for a while as if nobody was left to play with us. Of course there remained that Barrie fellow who knows all the ducks in Kensington Gardens and agrees with us that it is very foolish to grow up; but he obstinately made up his mind to play only in a play-house thenceforward, instead of telling us stories as of yore. Then along came a chap named Kenneth Grahame, who had the true miraculous voice and reminded us of the dream days of our golden age. Surely he knew how to play! He had not forgotten that everything on earth is wonderful, that the commonest action is romance, that all work rightly undertaken is good fun, that hardship is adventure, that sorrow is poetry, and that happiness is religion....
The Wind in the Willows is a poem in praise of the glory that can never really pass away from earth, unless we allow ourselves to grow up and forget—which, you may be sure, we shall never, never do, until what time the birds shall cease to sing about the tomb of Tusitala. It reveals anew the miracle of out-of-doors. The romance of the river, the allurement of the open road, the tremulous ecstatic terrors of the wild wood, the sad sweet tug of heart-strings by the sense of home, the poignant wander-longing, the amusement of adventure,—all these moods of simple wonderment are told and sung in its enchanting pages....