The Art of the Story-Teller by Marie L. Shedlock
page 92 of 264 (34%)
page 92 of 264 (34%)
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he says:
"I remember well the feeling roused in my mind at the mention or sight of the name _Lucifer_ during the early years of my life. It stood for me as the name of a being stupendous, dreadful in moral deformity, lurid, hideous and mighty. I remember the surprise with which, when I had grown somewhat older and began to study Latin, I came upon the name in Virgil where it means _light-bringer_--the herald of the Sun." Plato has said that "the end of education should be the training by suitable habits of the instincts of virtue in the child." About two thousand years later, Sir Philip Sydney, in his "Defence of Poesy," says: "The final end of learning is to draw and lead us to so high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of." And yet it is neither the Greek philosopher nor the Elizabethan poet that makes the everyday application of these principles; but we have a hint of this application from the Pueblo tribe of Indians, of whom Lummis tells us the following: "There is no duty to which a Pueblo child is trained in which he has to be content with a bare command: do this. For each, he learns a fairy-tale designed to explain how children first came to know that it was right to 'do this,' and detailing the sad results that befall those who did otherwise. Some tribes have regular story-tellers, men who have devoted a great deal of time to learning the myths and stories of their people and who possess, in addition to good memory, a vivid imagination. The mother sends for one of these, and having prepared a |
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