Robert Louis Stevenson's venerated volume of children's poems has prospered during more than a century in print. Here is a comfortable world of sunny gardens and storybooks, where children play with toy soldiers and imaginary friends. You may remember some of these poems from your own childhood, such as "My Shadow," "The Swing," and "The Land of Counterpane". If time is any judge, this garden of delights will stay a perennial favourite. The 64 poems in A Child's Garden of Verses are a masterly evocation of childhood from the author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped. They are full of delightful irony, wit and the fantasy worlds of childhood imagination, and introduce for the first time the Land of Nod. But they are also touched with a genuine and gentle pathos at times as they recall a world which seems so far away from us now.