Page:Grimm Goblins (1876).djvu/12

 Ti INTRODUCTION.

boundless wealth of golden sunlight and silver moonlight, fairy bowers and marble palaces, flowery balconies and orange groves, beauteous princesses and handsome princes, enchanters and magicians, giants and dwarfs, elves and sprites, et hoc genua omne. They encircle us with an unfading aureola of rich humorous fantasy.

Have any one of our readers ever watched the countenance of a child listening to his first Fairy Talc, noticed the starting tear, the ecstasy of delight, or the tremble of distress playing o'er the mobile ftoe? No astute physiognomist is needed there to tell us what is ]NUMing in the tiny mind. The child is in a world of actual living reality. He hears not merely — ^he sees it all ; with parted lip, with flashing eye and heaving breast, he devours every word with an implieit faith that is well-nigh inspired. It is no Fairy world to him ]x>w. Every character lives and breathes before him with a startling embodiment — one would not dare dispel the illusion. What more beautiful picture 7 Painter, where is thy pencil ? Canst thou paint me a better picture than this ? That little child, emblem of all purity and innocence, with hushed awe and rapt attention, spellbound under the fsiscinatioiis of a magician like an Andersen or a Qrimm, is receiving in its spotless mind its first enthralling lesson ; whilst, fiill of wo&derment and reverenoe, it lives in an atmosphere of Fairy entranoe- Bent. Look at the attitude of that lovely girl lauding with ddight* every feature lighted up in a bath of sunshine; lode at her dimpled rounded arms as she dasps her hands in ecsta^, eager to catoh every qrttable, and fearing lest a word should escape — every pose, every Hesture full of grace and beauty! Surely this is a picture more beaatifial than ever met the gaze of Praxiteles, or arrested the e^e of Phidias ? And this is what we have seen when a mother has been reading out the exquifi&te tales of Qrinim or Andersen to a delighted group of lovely children. Would we eould paint sttoh a pieture ! And then, when the spell is loosed and the little tangnes eot free, how they prattle for hours together over every iacident with