This is a patently polemical exhortation. It is a plea for children's literature, a plea that we distinguish literature from manifestoes, however commendable the causes espoused by the latter may be. What I urge is the restoration of literature, to replace social manifestoes. It is not uncommon to present our students with examples of eighteenthand nineteenth-century books for children, commenting condescendingly on their morose passion for instruction. However, as the engaging children's literature conference in Frankfurt in 1985 made amply clear, especially during the opening comments, what is today generally advocated in books for children differs in the intensity of its didactic intent not one whit from the earnest compulsion to protect-even more, to indoctrinateof any books of our benighted ancestors. Literature, however-as Walter Pater suggested when he reminded us that all arts aspire to the condition of music-does not function primarily in our ratiocinative cerebral lobes. Worthy as religious or socially programmatic exhortations may be, programmatic morality is neither the function nor the distinguishing quality of literature. Not that literature is immoral or even amoral. Literature, like music, is intensely and profoundly moral-is moral, in fact, in the most humanly catholic and encompassing sense. Literature asserts our common and shared humanity in that its subject is experience perceived by the uniquely human sensibility. Literature, like music, confirms our brotherhood and our sisterhood by rendering-frequently metaphorically-what it actually is like to be you, to be me, to be in love, to be alone, to be in despair or in elation. In the case of poetry, we have little trouble understanding this point. Novels, however, tend to confuse the issue.