Children are not born knowing the way, though -- they have to learn it, by keeping their eyes and ears open. A lot comes in through those eyes and ears, noise as well as information. Stories distill some of the chaos, picking out details worth particular attention, and giving a shape and meaning to what might otherwise make no sense.

Grown-ups, whose job it is to help children find their way, tend to fill their stories with signposts in the form of boldly highlighted morals. (Miss L.'s many stories were meant to instruct as well as entertain.) That's obvious to most people when they think of 19th century children's classics. "Heidi," "The Secret Garden," "Peter Rabbit," "The Snow Queen," even that tender swashbuckler, "Treasure Island," all blare intricate riffs on: Grow up good.

Though it's harder to see today's message because it so pervades our lives and language, current books are just as preachy. They merely preach a different moral: Grow up healthy. Books as unlike each other as "Sarah, Plain and Tall," Patricia McLaughlin's somber tale of broken hearts healing, and "In the Night Kitchen," Maurice Sendak's ebullient, nude romp through childish desire, give their young readers instruction in psychological doctrine.

That's not to say those books are bad. Though the worst of the old and new sound as though they were written by Puritans or guidance counselors, many are marvelous. And not because they transcend their moralizing, but because they do it so well. Children love morals: they want the witch to die; they want the new mommy to make home a loving place again. Even for today's readers, "Little Women" owes a lot of its appeal to saintly Beth March, not solely to rebellious Jo.

The March girls, whose author didn't supply them with children's books of their own, take the same sort of delight from passionately reading and discussing John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" that my contemporaries and my friends' children get from "Little Women." Though Bunyan's 17th century Christian allegory, a long voyage to end all long voyages, is hard to read these days, the sisters' enthusiasm rings true. "Pilgrim's Progress" supplies them with fantasy that's ballasted by significance, just as books like Sendak's inspired odyssey, "Where the Wild Things Are," do for modern children.