The
world has been educated, but not as man would have trained and taught it.
"He led us by a way we knew not," led, and is leading us, we know not
whither; we follow in fear.
The student of this lore can look back and see the long trodden way
behind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and over burning
sands. He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the towns where the
race has tarried, for shorter times or longer, strange places many of
them, and strangely haunted, desolate dwellings and inhospitable. But
the scarce visible tracks converge at last on the beaten ways, the ways
to that city whither mankind is wandering, and which it may never win. We
have a foreboding of a purpose which we know not, a sense as of will,
working, as we would not have worked, to a hidden end.
This is the lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology,
which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It may become the most
attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich in strange
curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered and arrayed by
the pupils in that allegory of Novalis. I am not likely to regret the
accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness
which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity. But the poetry
and the significance of them are apt to be hidden by the enormous crowd
of details. Only late we find the true meaning of what seems like a mass
of fantastic, savage eccentricities.
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