th everything that is most abhorrent
to our Christianized moral sense some of them so hideous, others so
melancholy and miserable, amid which the Greek tragedians sought their
themes, and moulded them into the sternest forms of grief that ever the
world saw; was such material the stuff that children's playthings should
be made of! How were they to be purified? How was the blessed sunshine
to be thrown into them?

But Eustace told me that these myths were the most singular things in
the world, and that he was invariably astonished, whenever he began
to relate one, by the readiness with which it adapted itself to the
childish purity of his auditors. The objectionable characteristics seem
to be a parasitical growth, having no essential connection with the
original fable. They fall away, and are thought of no more, the instant
he puts his imagination in sympathy with the innocent little circle,
whose wide-open eyes are fixed so eagerly upon him. Thus the stories
(not by any strained effort of the narrator's, but in harmony with their
inherent germ) transform themselves, and re-assume the shapes which they
might be supposed to possess in the pure childhood of the world. When
the first poet or romancer told these marvellous legends (such is
Eustace Bright's opinion), it was still the Golden Age. Evil had never
yet existed; and sorrow, misfortune, crime, were mere shadows which
the mind fancifully created for itself, as a shelter against too sunny
realities; or, at most, but prophetic dreams to which the dreamer
himself did not yield a waking credence. Children are now the only
representatives of the men and women of that happy era; and therefore it
is that we must raise the intellect and fancy to the level of childhood,
in order to re-create the original myths.

I let the youthful author talk as much and as extravagantly as he
pleased, and was glad to see him commencing life with such confidence in
himself and his performances. A few years will do all that is necessary
towards showing him the truth in both respects. Meanwhile, it is
but right to say, he does really appear to have overcome the moral
objections against these fables, although at the expense of such
liberties with their structure as must be left to plead their own
excuse, without any help from me. Indeed, except that there was a
necessity for it--and that the inner life of the legends cannot be come
at save by making them entirely one's own property--there is no