A Child’s Garden of Verses By Robert Louis Stevenson A Child’s Garden of Verses is a collection of poetry for children about darkness and solitude by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. The collection first appeared in 1885 under the title Penny Whistles, but has been reprinted many times, often in illustrated versions. It contains about 65 poems including the cherished classics “Foreign Children,” “The Lamplighter,” “The Land of Counterpane,” “Bed in Summer,” “My Shadow” and “The Swing.” The classical scholar Terrot Reaveley Glover published a translation of the poems into Latin in 1922 under the title Carmina non prius audita de ludis et hortis virginibus puerisque.