in the pages of our own chroniclers, or the records of the kindred
Scandinavians--they are so intruded into the very laws, so blended
with the very life, of our Saxon forefathers, that without employing
them, in somewhat of the same credulous spirit with which they were
originally conceived, no vivid impression of the People they
influenced can be conveyed. Not without truth has an Italian writer
remarked, "that he who would depict philosophically an unphilosophical
age, should remember that, to be familiar with children, one must
sometimes think and feel as a child."

Yet it has not been my main endeavour to make these ghostly agencies
conducive to the ordinary poetical purposes of terror, and if that
effect be at all created by them, it will be, I apprehend, rather
subsidiary to the more historical sources of interest than, in itself,
a leading or popular characteristic of the work. My object, indeed,
in the introduction of the Danish Vala especially, has been perhaps as
much addressed to the reason as to the fancy, in showing what large,
if dim, remains of the ancient "heathenesse" still kept their ground
on the Saxon soil, contending with and contrasting the monkish
superstitions, by which they were ultimately replaced. Hilda is not
in history; but without the romantic impersonation of that which Hilda
represents, the history of the time would be imperfectly understood.

In the character of Harold--while I have carefully examined and
weighed the scanty evidences of its distinguishing attributes which
are yet preserved to us--and, in spite of no unnatural partiality,
have not concealed what appear to me its deficiencies, and still less
the great error of the life it illustrates,--I have attempted,
somewhat and slightly, to shadow out the ideal of the pure Saxon
character, such as it was then, with its large qualities undeveloped,