work intended not only for
general perusal, but which on many accounts, I hope, may be entrusted
fearlessly to the young; while those alterations are in strict accordance
with the spirit of the time, and tend to illustrate one of its most
marked peculiarities.

More apology is perhaps due for the liberal use to which I have applied
the superstitions of the age. But with the age itself those
superstitions are so interwoven--they meet us so constantly, whether 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, but marked already by
patient endurance, love of justice, and freedom--the manly sense of duty
rather than the chivalric sentim