Yuletide stories - 1853 Author:Benjamin Thorpe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: itself a child, the wondrous bird Imaffination, the Popular Tale. And now the mother saw her children no longer sad; for the Tale continued with the children, an... more »d they were never weary of it as long as they were children, and it was only after they possessed the Tale that the garden and its flowers, the arbours and the grottoes, the woods and groves, afforded them true pleasure; for the Tale enlivened everything to their great happiness. The Tale even lent them its wings, and they flew far away in the vast world, and, nevertheless, were at home again as soon as they desired. Those royal children are human beings in their childhood's paradise, and nature is their beautiful, gentle mother. She wished the wondrous bird Imagination down from heaven, which has such splendid golden feathers, and also some of jet black, and it laid in her lap the golden egg of Fiction. And as the children contracted an ardent love for the Tale, which sweetened their early days, delighted them with its thousand varying forms and metamorphoses, and flew over every house and hut, over every castle and palace, so was its nature such that even those of maturer age found pleasure in it, provided only that in their riper years they possessed something which they had brought with them from the garden of childhood, a child-like simplicity of heart. chapter{Section 4SCANDINAVIAN AND NOBTH GEEMAN POPULAR TALES AND TRADITIONS. SWEDISH. THE WERWOLF. From Upland. There was once a king, who ruled over a large kingdom. He was married to a beautiful queen, by whom he had only one child, a daughter. Hence it naturally followed that the little one was to her parents as the apple of their eye, and was dear to them beyond all other things, so that they thought of nothing with such delight as of the pleasur...« less