In Anderson’s “Thumbelina” the little girl (“an inch tall”) one day discovers a dead bird in the passage that leads to the mole’s underground home. After the mole and the field mouse walk away from the dead swallow and conclude that the bird has died from the cold of winter, Thumbelina looks with kindness on the swallow. She kisses the closed eyes of the bird. Later in the evening she returns with a rug she has woven and covers the body of the swallow, also placing cotton around the bird for extra warmth. Her kind words complement her loving gestures: “Good-bye, and thank you for the lovely song you sang in the summer-time, when all the trees were green and the sun shone warmly on us!” When Thumbelina places her head upon the swallow’s breast in an affectionate embrace, she is startled by the stirring of life within the bird: “It was the bird’s heart. The bird was not dead: it lay numb with cold, and now that warmth was returning to it, it showed signs of life again.” The following night Thumbelina again returns to nurse the sick bird suffering from exhaustion and weakness, and for the entire winter the child provides nourishment, warmth, and affection for the swallow. Restored to health, the swallow takes wings in the spring and flies into the open air and sunshine, owing its life to the child. The tiny Thumbelina moves the lifeless heart of a powerful bird. The one-inch child with her gentle touches and sweet words empowers a dead swallow to soar into the heights, “high up into the air, over forest and lake, high up over the great mountains where snow always lies.” The influence of the child’s love for the lost, dying bird is inestimable, a magical cure for sadness, sickness, and death.

In “The Snow Queen” the young Gerda relies entirely upon her powers as a child to find her lost playmate Kay who has been captured by the Snow Queen and transported to the land of ice. When the splinter of glass from the devil’s mirror entered Kay’s eye and heart, it deprived him of his innocence and sense of wonder, weakening his special protection as a child. Instead of marveling at his picture book and his grandmother’s stories, Kay scoffed at the books as “Baby-stuff” and ridiculed his grandparent. Instead of delighting in the friendship of Gerda and enjoying the flowers in the garden where they always played, Kay loses his childlikeness and carefreeness, which are the secrets of a child’s power. Kay substitutes scientific analysis for natural wonder as he scrutinizes the lovely flower and delicate snowflake under the microscope. He loses interest in the simple, the natural, and the innocent as he acquires a cynical, skeptical attitude caused by the splinter—the shard from the devil’s mirror which robs him of his childhood and the special graces of that age. Reciting only the multiplication tables and never uttering the Lord’s Prayer, Kay becomes ungrateful and callous—a hardheartedness that leads him to the Snow Queen’s land of ice where he loses all memory of Gerda, his grandmother, and his childhood. Thus the splinter from the devil’s mirror signifies the loss of childhood with its innocence and wonder—a loss which makes a person see “everything good as bad or twisted” and leaves his heart like “lumps of ice.” His childhood lost and his innocence spoiled, Kay loses the power of the child and becomes the captive of the Snow Queen.

Gerda, however, refuses to believe that Kay is dead after his sudden disappearance and goes on a long, demanding search in quest of her beloved friend who provided her the fondest memories of her childhood:

And the little ones held each other’s hands, kissed the roses, and looking up towards God’s bright sunshine, they spoke to it as though the Christ were there Himself. What beautiful summer days they were; how lovely it was to be outside near the fresh rose-trees that seemed as if they would never stop blooming!

I cannot give her any greater power than she has already. Don’t you see how great that is? How men and beasts all feel that they must serve her? How far she has come in the wide world on her own bare feet? She must not learn of her power; it comes from her own heart, from her being a dear and innocent child. If she can’t find her own way into the Snow Queen’s palace and free little Kay, there is nothing that we can do to help.

The power of child sounds incongruous if we compare it to the power of a witch, a giant, or a king, yet Gerda is more powerful than the mighty Snow Queen. She can touch the heart and melt hardheartedness. When Gerda finally discovers Kay, she is moved to tears in rejoining her dear playmate—tears that remove the lump of ice in his heart, tears that recall the happy days of their childhood, tears that disenchant Kay from the spell of the Snow Queen. When Gerda sings the song they used to sing together in the rose garden, Kay is touched and begins to cry the tears of joy that wash away the splinter of glass from his eye. The Finmark woman was correct: the power of an innocent child with a pure heart is incalculable. All of the characters whom Gerda encounters in her journey do special favors for her because they are charmed by her sincerity and moved by her deep affection for her friend. How can one say no to a child? That is the secret or mystery of her power, the power of “being a dear and innocent child” that comes from her purity.

In The Secret Garden Misselthwaite Manor is enshrouded with sorrow, sickness, and death. The owner, Mr. Craven, leaves for long journeys to escape from the painful memories associated with the estate and the garden. His beloved wife who died ten years earlier spent all of her leisure in the garden—now a neglected, abandoned, locked part of the manor which Mr. Craven avoids. His son Colin is an invalid whose condition appears incurable, and Colin imagines that the only future in store for him is an early death. Mr. Craven avoids his own son because the boy’s birth coincides with the death of his wife and also evokes “the tears of things.” Into this atmosphere of gloom and lifelessness arrives Mary Lennox, a ten-year-old orphan whose nearest relative will now be her guardian. Spoiled as an only child by her parents’ wealth when they lived in India, Mary is not the typical child abounding in energy, playfulness, and imagination. Introverted and introspective, she takes no interest in the world around her, shows no desire to learn, explore, or be outdoors, and reveals no capacity for friendship, appearing more as a “sharp old woman” than “a real child” to the gardener who calls her “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary.” Listless, unsociable, and pale, Mary appears as lifeless as the garden that no one has tended for ten years. The housekeeper remarks, “She had never seen a child who sat so still without doing anything.” The secret garden of Mary’s childhood is as dead as Mrs. Craven’s decaying garden: “‘I don’t play,’ said Mary, ‘I have nothing to play with.’”

When Mrs. Sowersby, a kind neighbor and mother of twelve children, presents Mary with the gift of a jump rope, the present becomes a key which opens the door to the garden of her childhood and allows her to bloom like a child. For Mrs. Sowersby the jump rope promises health and rejuvenation:

“Nothin’ will do her more good than skippin’ rope. It’s the sensiblest toy a child can have. Let her play out in th’ fresh air skippin’ an’ it’ll stretch her lags an’ arms an’ give her some strength in’em.”

Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight.

She was standing inside the secret garden.

The mystery of childhood, then, in The Secret Garden is the mystery of a catalyst. Without directly, deliberately, intentionally attempting to remove the pall that surrounds Misselthwaite Manor, to cure a sickly child of his chronic condition, or to restore an absentees father’s love for his son, Mary Lennox’s fun in the garden and her sharing of the secret with other children cause a wave of reaction in which each person who has been touched by Mary’s contagious enthusiasm for life shares or spread that joy with others in a spontaneous outburst of dynamic, explosive energy that resembles the life forces erupting in the secret garden when Mary and her friends plant seeds which grew “as if fairies had tended them”:

That is the Magic. The flowers are growing—the roots are stirring. That is the Magic. Being alive is the Magic—being strong is the Magic. The Magic is in me. The Magic is in me.

Thus the secret power of children which remains a hidden mystery to them is their ability to awaken the dormant childhood and happy memories of adults, to touch and melt the heat with sweetness and innocence, to spread their happiness and share their good news to one and all, and to brighten a darkened, tragic world with hope. With a kiss Thumbelina restores the dead swallow to the world of the living. With tears Gerda rescues the frozen, hardened Kay from the bleak world of the Snow Queen. With laughter and mirth Mary Lennox revives the dying Colin Craven and renews the beauty of the garden and restores the love between a father and a son. The power of children resembles the power of flowers, which, in their fragility and delicacy, influence the human heart profoundly—often to the point of tears. In “Thumbelina” the woman who longed for a child found her in the middle of a tulip: “. . .right in the middle of the flower, on a green stool, sat a tiny little girl: she was not above an inch tall, and so she was called Thumbelina.” In “The Snow Queen” Gerda and Kay enjoy their happiest hours playing in the rose garden: “how lovely it was to be outside near the fresh rose-trees that seemed as if they would never stop blooming!” The laughter and fun of the children in The Secret Garden also occurs in the surroundings of flowers, and the first thing Mary Lennox notices after opening the hidden door were the rose-bushes: “there were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains. . . .” Likewise, King Midas’s daughter Marygold is found playing every morning in the rose garden: “As soon as I was dressed, I ran to the garden to gather roses for you,” she cries to her father. The power to produce the tears of happiness—the purest form of joy—is the magic of children who touch the depths of the soul in the same mysterious way that Gerda melts the heart of Kay in the land of ice: