Page:Half a hundred hero tales of Ulysses and the men of old.djvu/7

 PREFACE

HE apology offered for adding yet another book of Classical Stories to the endless existing versions, ancient and modern, in verse and in prose, is the plea that Vivien offers to Merlin for her "tender rhyme":

"You Greeks," said the Egyptian priest to Herodotus, "are always children," and Greece will never lose the secret of eternal youth. The tale of Troy divine, of Thebes and Pelops' line, the song of sweet Colonus, the most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby, Dido with a willow in her hand—these old stories of Homer and Sophocles, of Virgil and Ovid, have not lost their gloss and freshness. "The innocent brightness of a new-born day is lovely yet." They have been sung or said by Wace and Caxton, by Chaucer and Wordsworth, by Keats and William Morris; they have been adapted for young readers by Fénelon, by Niebuhr, by Kingsley, by Hawthorne, and yet the last word has not been said. Each new editor makes his own selection, chooses some new facet, or displays the jewel in a new light. As Sainte-Beuve remarks of "Don Quixote" and other world classics, "One can discover there something more than the author first of all tried to see there, and certainly more than he dreamed of putting there."

The present collection of Fifty Stories (there might iii