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This Project Gutenberg Etext of My Young Alcides - A Faded
Photograph, by Charlotte M Yonge, was prepared by Sandra Laythorpe.
A web page about Charlotte M Yonge may be found at
www.menorot.com/cmyonge.htm.
MY YOUNG ALCIDES
A FADED PHOTOGRAPH
by
Charlotte M Yonge
PREFACE
Ideas have a tyrannous power of insisting on being worked out, even
when one fears they may be leading in a track already worthily
preoccupied.
But the Hercules myth did not seem to me to be like one of the fairy
tales that we have seen so gracefully and quaintly modernised; and at
the risk of seeming to travestie the Farnese statue in a shooting-
coat and wide-awake, I could not help going on, as the notion grew
deeper and more engrossing.
For, whether the origin of the myth be, or be not, founded on solar
phenomena, the yearning Greek mind formed on it an unconscious
allegory of the course of the Victor, of whom the Sun, rejoicing as a
giant to run his course, is another type, like Samson of old, since
the facts of nature and of history are Divine parables.
And as each one's conquest is, in the track of his Leader, the only
true Conqueror, so Hercules, in spite of all the grotesque adjuncts
that the lower inventions of the heathen hung round him, is a far
closer likeness of manhood--as, indeed, the proverbial use of some of
his tasks testifies--and of repentant man conquering himself.
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