It would hardly be doing yourself justice , were you to bring me acquainted with them , sitting here on this snow bank ! '' So we descended the hill to my small , old cottage , and shut ourselves up in the south-eastern room , where the sunshine comes in , warmly and brightly , through the better half of a winter 's day . Eustace put his bundle of manuscript into my hands ; and I skimmed through it pretty rapidly , trying to find out its merits and demerits by the touch of my fingers , as a veteran story-teller ought to know how to do . It will be remembered that Mr. Bright condescended to avail himself of my literary experience by constituting me editor of the `` Wonder-Book . '' As he had no reason to complain of the reception of that erudite work by the public , he was now disposed to retain me in a similar position with respect to the present volume , which he entitled TANGLEWOOD TALES . Not , as Eustace hinted , that there was any real necessity for my services as introducer , inasmuch as his own name had become established in some good degree of favor with the literary world . But the connection with myself , he was kind enough to say , had been highly agreeable ; nor was he by any means desirous , as most people are , of kicking away the ladder that had perhaps helped him to reach his present elevation . My young friend was willing , in short , that the fresh verdure of his growing reputation should spread over my straggling and half-naked boughs ; even as I have sometimes thought of training a vine , with its broad leafiness , and purple fruitage , over the worm-eaten posts and rafters of the rustic summer house . I was not insensible to the advantages of his proposal , and gladly assured him of my acceptance . Merely from the title of the stories I saw at once that the subjects were not less rich than those of the former volume ; nor did I at all doubt that Mr. Bright 's audacity -LRB- so far as that endowment might avail -RRB- had enabled him to take full advantage of whatever capabilities they offered . Yet , in spite of my experience of his free way of handling them , I did not quite see , I confess , how he could have obviated all the difficulties in the way of rendering them presentable to children . These old legends , so brimming over with 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 -LRB- not by any strained effort of the narrator 's , but in harmony with their inherent germ -RRB- 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 -LRB- such is Eustace Bright 's opinion -RRB- , 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 XXXXX childhood , in order to re-create the original myths .
So as by for into of on that to with