Public-domain ebook
Language: en1,078 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Children & Young Adult Reading·Mythology, Legends & Folklore
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #35377.
This volume is a collection of retold Greek myths aimed at a youthful audience, assembled by a nineteenth‑century author who believes that ancient legends can be reshaped for “capital reading for children.” The book opens with a lyrical description of an autumn morning at the country estate called Tanglewood, where a lively group of children, named after flowers and herbs, gather on the porch under the watchful eye of a bright‑eyed college student, Eustace Bright. Their chatter and curiosity set the stage for the storyteller’s first tale, a version of the Perseus and the Gorgon myth, introduced through a lively dialogue that invites the listeners to “hold all your tongues” as the narrative begins. The contents list reveals a dozen such stories, each presented as a self‑contained adventure that blends mythic plot with the author’s own imaginative flourishes.
The prose reflects the ornate, didactic style of mid‑Victorian literature, with elaborate sentences, frequent asides, and a gentle moralizing tone. The narrator’s voice is both scholarly and playful, treating the children as capable of grasping lofty ideas provided they are expressed simply. Readers who enjoy richly described settings, whimsical character names, and a blend of classical mythology with a nostalgic, almost fairy‑tale atmosphere will find this work appealing. It suits those who appreciate a historic approach to myth retelling, particularly younger readers and adults who relish a gentle, lyrical immersion in Greek legends without the dense academic commentary of modern editions.
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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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