text:  With a temper of pure childlike antiquity they express in the persons of the dwarfs--_Teutonic approximative fairies_--the sympathy of the spirits with unstained and innocent human manners; and may if the traditions which exhibit the fairies under a cloud of sin and sorrow should have been felt by the reader as at all grating upon his old love of them help to soothe and reconcile him by a soft gleam of illumination here lingering as in a newly revealed Golden Age of his own