A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales: For girls boys

The author has long been of opinion that many of the classical myths were capable of being rendered into verycapital reading for children. In the little volume here offered to the public, he has worked up half a dozen ofthem, with this end in view. A great freedom of treatment was necessary to his plan; but it will be observed byevery one who attempts to render these legends malleable in his intellectual furnace, that they aremarvellously independent of all temporary modes and circumstances. They remain essentially the same, afterchanges that would affect the identity of almost anything else.He does not, therefore, plead guilty to a sacrilege, in having sometimes shaped anew, as his fancy dictated, theforms that have been hallowed by an antiquity of two or three thousand years. No epoch of time can claim acopyright in these immortal fables. They seem never to have been made; and certainly, so long as man exists,they can never perish; but, by their indestructibility itself, they are legitimate subjects for every age to clothewith its own garniture of manners and sentiment, and to imbue with its own morality. In the present versionthey may have lost much of their classical aspect (or, at all events, the author has not been careful to preserveit), and have, perhaps, assumed a Gothic or romantic guise.In performing this pleasant task,--for it has been really a task fit for hot weather, and one of the mostagreeable, of a literary kind, which he ever undertook,--the author has not always thought it necessary to writedownward, in order to meet the comprehension of children. He has generally suffered the theme to soar,whenever such was its tendency, and when he himself was buoyant enough to follow without an effort.Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or feeling, so long as itis simple, likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them.

Pagina's: 166, Editie: Large Print, Paperback, Createspace Independent Publishing Platform