As the song ended a shadow crossed the moonlight, that lay white andlustrous before the aperture of the cavern; and Nymphalin, looking up,beheld a graceful yet grotesque figure standing on the sward without,and gazing on the group in the cave. It was a shaggy form, with a goat'slegs and ears; but the rest of its body, and the height of the stature,like a man's. An arch, pleasant, yet malicious smile played about itslips; and in its hand it held the pastoral pipe of which poets havesung,--they would find it difficult to sing to it!
"And who art thou?" said Fayzenheim, with the air of a hero.
"I am the last lingering wanderer of the race which the Romansworshipped; hither I followed their victorious steps, and in these greenhollows have I remained. Sometimes in the still noon, when the leaves ofspring bud upon the whispering woods, I peer forth from my rocky lair,and startle the peasant with my strange voice and stranger shape. Thengoes he home, and puzzles his thick brain with mopes and fancies, tillat length he imagines me, the creature of the South! one of his northerndemons, and his poets adapt the apparition to their barbarous lines."
"Ho!" quoth the silver king, "surely thou art the origin of the fabledSatan of the cowled men living whilom in yonder ruins, with its hornsand goatish limbs; and the harmless faun has been made the figurationof the most implacable of fiends. But why, O wanderer of the South,lingerest thou in these foreign dells? Why returnest thou not to thebi-forked hill-top of old Parnassus, or the wastes around the yellowcourse of the Tiber?"
"My brethren are no more," said the poor faun; "and the very faith thatleft us sacred and unharmed is departed. But here all the spirits not ofmortality are still honoured; and I wander, mourning for Silenus, thoughamidst the vines that should console me for his loss."
"Thou hast known great beings in thy day," said the leaden king, wholoved the philosophy of a truism (and the history of whose inspirationsI shall one day write).
"Ah, yes," said the faun; "my birth was amidst the freshness of theworld, when the flush of the universal life coloured all things withdivinity; when not a tree but had its Dryad, not a fountain that waswithout its Nymph. I sat by the gray throne of Saturn, in his old age,ere yet he was discrowned (for he was no visionary ideal, but the archmonarch of the pastoral age), and heard from his lips the history of theworld's birth. But those times are gone forever,--they have left harshsuccessors."
"It is the age of paper," muttered the lord treasurer, shaking his head.
"What ho, for a dance!" cried Fayzenheim, too royal for moralities, andhe whirled the beautiful Nymphalin into a waltz. Then forth issued thefairies, and out went the dwarfs. And the faun leaning against an agedelm, ere yet the midnight waned, the elves danced their charmed roundto the antique minstrelsy of his pipe,--the minstrelsy of the Grecianworld!
"Hast thou seen yet, my Nymphalin," said Fayzenheim, in the pauses ofthe dance, "the recess of the Hartz, and the red form of its mightyhunter?"
"It is a fearful sight," answered Nymphalin; "but with thee I should notfear."
"Away then!" cried Fayzenheim; "let us away at the first cock-crow, intothose shaggy dells; for there is no need of night to conceal us, and theunwitnessed blush of morn or the dreary silence of noon is, no less thanthe moon's reign, the season for the sports of the superhuman tribes."
Nymphalin, charmed with the proposal, readily assented; and at the lasthour of night, bestriding the starbeams of the many-titled Friga, awaysped the fairy cavalcade to the gloom of the mystic Hartz.
Fain would I relate the manner of their arrival in the thick recessesof the forest,--how they found the Red Hunter seated on a fallen pinebeside a wide chasm in the earth, with the arching bows of the wizardoak wreathing above his head as a canopy, and his bow and spear lyingidle at his feet. Fain would I tell of the reception which he deigned tothe fairies, and how he told them of his ancient victories over man; howhe chafed at the gathering invasions of his realm; and how joyously hegloated of some great convulsion* in the northern States, which, raptinto moody reveries in those solitary woods, the fierce demon broodinglyforesaw. All these fain would I narrate, but they are not of the Rhine,and my story will not brook the delay. While thus conversing with thefiend, noon had crept on, and the sky had become overcast and lowering;the giant trees waved gustily to and fro, and the low gatherings ofthe thunder announced the approaching storm. Then the hunter rose andstretched his mighty limbs, and seizing his spear, he strode rapidlyinto the forest to meet the things of his own tribe that the tempestwakes from their rugged lair.
* Which has come to pass.--1847.
A sudden recollection broke upon Nymphalin. "Alas, alas!" she cried,wringing her hands; "what have I done! In journeying hither with thee,I have forgotten my office. I have neglected my watch over the elements,and my human charge is at this hour, perhaps, exposed to all the fury ofthe storm."
"Cheer thee, my Nymphalin," said the prince, "we will lay the tempest;"and he waved his sword and muttered the charms which curb the winds androll back the marching thunder: but for once the tempest ceased not athis spells. And now, as the fairies sped along the troubled air, apale and beautiful form met them by the way, and the fairies paused andtrembled; for the power of that Shape could vanquish even them. Itwas the form of a Female, with golden hair, crowned with a chaplet ofwithered leaves; her bosoms, of an exceeding beauty, lay bare to thewind, and an infant was clasped between them, hushed into a sleep sostill, that neither the roar of the thunder, nor the livid lightningflashing from cloud to cloud, could even ruffle, much less arouse, theslumberer. And the face of the female was unutterably calm and sweet(though with a something of severe); there was no line nor wrinkle inthe hueless brow; care never wrote its defacing characters upon thateverlasting beauty. It knew no sorrow or change; ghostlike and shadowyfloated on that Shape through the abyss of Time, governing the worldwith an unquestioned and noiseless sway. And the children of the greensolitudes of the earth, the lovely fairies of my tale, shuddered as theygazed and recognized--the form of DEATH,--death vindicated.
"And why," said the beautiful Shape, with a voice soft as the last sighsof a dying babe,--"why trouble ye the air with spells? Mine is the hourand the empire, and the storm is the creature of my power. Far yonder tothe west it sweeps over the sea, and the ship ceases to vex the waves;it smites the forest, and the destined tree, torn from its roots, feelsthe winter strip the gladness from its boughs no more! The roar of theelements is the herald of eternal stillness to their victims; and theywho hear the progress of my power idly shudder at the coming of peace.And thou, O tender daughter of the fairy kings, why grievest thou at amortal's doom? Knowest thou not that sorrow cometh with years, and thatto live is to mourn? Blessed is the flower that, nipped in its earlyspring, feels not the blast that one by one scatters its blossoms aroundit, and leaves but the barren stem. Blessed are the young whom I claspto my breast, and lull into the sleep which the storm cannot break, northe morrow arouse to sorrow or to toil. The heart that is stilled in thebloom of its first emotions, that turns with its last throb to the eyeof love, as yet unlearned in the possibility of change,--has exhaustedalready the wine of life, and is saved only from the lees. As the mothersoothes to sleep the wail of her troubled child, I open my arms to thevexed spirit, and my bosom cradles the unquiet to repose!"
The fairies answered not, for a chill and a fear lay over them, and theShape glided on; ever as it passed away through the veiling clouds theyheard its low voice singing amidst the roar of the storm, as the dirgeof the water-sprite over the vessel it hath lured into the whirlpool orthe shoals.
The Pilgrims of the Rhine Page 59