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The author has long been of opinion that many of the classical myths
were capable of being rendered into very capital reading for children.
In the little volume here offered to the public, he has worked up half
a dozen of them, with this end in view. A great freedom of treatment
was necessary to his plan; but it will be observed by every one who
attempts to render these legends malleable in his intellectual
furnace, that they are marvellously independent of all temporary modes
and circumstances. They remain essentially the same, after changes
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, the forms that have been
hallowed by an antiquity of two or three thousand years. No epoch of
time can claim a copyright 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 clothe with its own garniture of
manners and sentiment, and to imbue with its own morality. In the
present version they may have lost much of their classical aspect (or,
at all events, the author has not been careful to preserve it), 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 most agreeable, of a literary kind,
which he ever undertook,--the author has not always thought it
necessary to write downward, 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 it is
simple likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that
bewilder them.
LENOX, _July 15, 1851_.
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