Preface
My Dear Young Folks,
Here are some more stories from the wonderful Annals of Fairyland. How they were first told at the Court of King Oberon, and how they came to be recorded you will learn at the beginning, and much as you love the little people you will, I think, like them even better when you have learned all that this volume has to tell. Mr William Canton has told you the stories properly belonging to “The Reign of King Herla,” Mr J. M. Gibbon showed you how a famous merry old soul and his court found entertainment in story-telling in “The Reign of King Cole,” and now it is my pleasant privilege to put before you, from the inexhaustible Annals, those tales which properly belong to “The Reign of King Oberon.”
Of course you may have already met some of these stories before, for most of our best writers have been made free of Fairyland and have written of the wonderful things they learned there; Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm have long since been famous for all that they have told of their visits to the marvellous land, and some of the stories which they brought back will be found to belong to the reign of Oberon and Titania, while others have been told by Ben Jonson, by Thomas Hood, by Charles Perrault, by Thomas Crofton Croker, by Douglas Jerrold, by Benjamin Thorpe and by Sir George Dasent—but old or new all have the perennial youthfulness of the fairies themselves, and as long as we can truly enjoy them we shall not grow old.
The Editor.
Dedication
To My Children
One time I chanced upon a fairy ring
Wherein Titania’s lieges held their court,
And watched the fairies merrily disport,
While sweetly the near nightingale did fling
His magic music over everything,
Till all in me was to that wonder wrought
Where feeling reaches heights unknown to thought,
Where spirit unto spirit seems to sing.
My heart ached when too soon one fairy went
To rest ’mid flow’rs, and yet it came to pass
In that green world there seemed no room for fears,—
By dancing joys fresh joy to me was sent,
Though ever more that vacant place there was,
When dews befell, and in my eyes were tears.
W. J.
