In a word, the fairy stories have come true; they are historical in the
sense that they faithfully report a stage of spiritual growth and
predict a higher order of realities through a deeper knowledge of
actualities. They were poetic renderings of facts which science is fast
verifying, chiefly by the use of the same faculty which enriched early
literature with the myth and the fairy tale. The scientist has turned
poet in these later days, and the imagination which once expressed
itself in a free handling of facts so as to make them answer the needs
and demands of the human spirit, now expresses itself in that breadth of
vision which reconstructs an extinct animal from a bone and analyzes the
light of a sun flaming on the outermost boundaries of space.

This collection of tales, gathered from the rich literature of the
childhood of the world, or from the books of the few modern men who have
found the key of that wonderful world, is put forth not only without
apology, but with the hope that it may widen the demand for these
charming reports of a world in which the truths of our working world are
loyally upheld, while its hard facts are quietly but authoritatively
dismissed from attention. The widest interpretation has been given to
the fairy tale, so as to include many of those classic romances of
childhood in which no fairy appears, but which are invested with the air
and are permeated with the glorious freedom of fairy land.

No sane man or woman undervalues the immense gains of the modern world
in the knowledge of facts and the application of ideas to things in
order to secure comfort, health, access to the treasure in the earth and
on its surface, the means of education and greater freedom from the
tyranny of toil by the accumulation of the fruits of toil; but no sane
man or woman believes that a mechanical age is other than a transitional