The secrets of this strange Wonderland make you so glad that you laugh and dance and sing.
‘Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful world,
With the wonderful water round you curled,
And the wonderful grass upon your breast,
World you are wonderfully drest.’
The ancient Wonderland of Hellas, of which this story tells, was unlike your Wonderland in this, that men and women dwelt in it as well as boys and girls, and they, too, saw and heard its secrets. And this was because, in a way not known to-day, each had kept the heart of a little child.
So it was that these men and women heard voices in the wind and laughter in the streams, so it was that they saw eyes in water springs and pearls in raindrops.
More even than these things the Hellenes saw. For across lone hillsides, through busy fields, in sacred groves and flower-sweet meadows, radiant figures sped. And the simple folk catching glimpses of these flitting forms said one to the other, ‘The gods have come to live among us. Their presence it is that makes the earth so fair, so wonderful.’ As the years passed and the Hellenes grew older, sterner times came. Cities sprang up on hillsides and by river-banks, and the gods were seldom seen. Men went to war, battles were lost and won.
But never, in victory or in defeat, did the people lose their early love of beauty, or that strange, dreamy sense of wonder, which from the beginning was ever plucking at their hearts.
They longed to fulfil their dreams of beauty, they wished to re-shape the world.