HERCULES AND THE GOLDEN APPLESHALF A HUNDRED
HERO TALES
OF ULYSSES AND THE MEN OF OLD
EDITED BY
FRANCIS STORR
EDITOR OF "THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATION," LONDON
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
FRANK C. PAPÉ
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1913
Copyright, 1911,
by
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published January, 1911
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
The apology offered for adding yet another book ofClassical Stories to the endless existing versions,ancient and modern, in verse and in prose, is the plea thatVivien offers to Merlin for her "tender rhyme":
And every minstrel sings it differently."
"You Greeks," said the Egyptian priest to Herodotus,"are always children," and Greece will never lose thesecret of eternal youth. The tale of Troy divine, ofThebes and Pelops' line, the song of sweet Colonus, themost cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby, Dido with awillow in her hand—these old stories of Homer andSophocles, of Virgil and Ovid, have not lost their glossand freshness. "The innocent brightness of a new-bornday is lovely yet." They have been sung or said by Waceand Caxton, by Chaucer and Wordsworth, by Keats andWilliam Morris; they have been adapted for young readersby Fénelon, by Niebuhr, by Kingsley, by Hawthorne,and yet the last word has not been said. Each new editormakes his own selection, chooses some new facet, ordisplays the jewel in a new light. As Sainte-Beuve remarksof "Don Quixote" and other world classics, "Onecan discover there something more than the author firstof all tried to see there, and certainly more than hedreamed of putting there."
The present collection of Fifty Stories (there might[Pg iv]well have been five hundred) makes no pretense eitherof completeness or of uniformity. Some of the contributorshave followed closely the texts, others havegiven free play to their fancy, but in every case themyths have been treated simply as stories and no attempthas been made either to trace their origin or to indicatetheir religious or ethical significance. Most of the storiespoint their own moral, and need no more commentarythan Jack the Giant-killer or the Sleeping Beauty. Youngreaders of to-day resent the sermons even of a Kingsley.From "Tanglewood Tales," a book that was the joy ofour childhood, we have borrowed ten stories, and havetaken the liberty of dividing into chapters and slightlyabridging the longest of Hawthorne's Tales. All but oneof the remaining forty are original versions.
CONTENTS