From Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin and William Makepeace Thackeray's Rose and the Ring to Kenneth Grahme's Reluctant Dragon and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, here are seventeen classic stories and poems from the golden age of the English fairy tale. Some of them amuse, some enchant, some satirize and criticize, but each one --in the words of Laurence Houseman, author of the classic Rocking Horse Land--"is an expression of the joy of living."

Accompanied by the illustrations from the original editions of these works--by such...