The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of Siegfried, by James Baldwin

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Title: The Story of Siegfried

Author: James Baldwin

Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6866]
Posting Date: June 2, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF SIEGFRIED ***

Produced by J. C. Byers

THE STORY OF SIEGFRIED

By James Baldwin

New York Charles Scribner's Sons

1899

To My Children,

Winfred, Louis, and Nellie,

This Book Is Affectionately Inscribed.

The Fore Word.

When the world was in its childhood, men looked upon the works of Nature
with a strange kind of awe. They fancied that every thing upon the
earth, in the air, or in the water, had a life like their own, and that
every sight which they saw, and every sound which they heard, was caused
by some intelligent being. All men were poets, so far as their ideas and
their modes of expression were concerned, although it is not likely that
any of them wrote poetry. This was true in regard to the Saxon in his
chilly northern home, as well as to the Greek in the sunny southland.
But, while the balmy air and clear sky of the south tended to refine
men's thoughts and language, the rugged scenery and bleak storms of
the north made them uncouth, bold, and energetic. Yet both the cultured
Greek and the rude Saxon looked upon Nature with much the same eyes,
and there was a strange resemblance in their manner of thinking and
speaking. They saw, that, in all the phenomena which took place around
them, there was a certain system or regularity, as if these were
controlled by some law or by some superior being; and they sought, in
their simple poetical way, to account for these appearances. They had
not yet learned to measure the distances of the stars, nor to calculate
the motions of the earth. The changing of the seasons was a mystery
which they scarcely sought to penetrate. But they spoke of these
occurrences in a variety of ways, and invented many charming, stories
with reference to them, not so much with a view towards accounting
for the mystery, as towards giving expression to their childlike but
picturesque ideas.

Thus