Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

"In still rest, in changeless simplicity, I bear,

uninterrupted, the consciousness of the whole of Humanity

within me."--SCHLEIERMACHERS, Monologen.

"... such a sweetness, such a grace,

In all thy speech appear,

That what to th'eye a beauteous face,

That thy tongue is to the ear."

--COWLEY.

The water was deep to the very edge; and I sprang from the little boat

upon a soft grassy turf. The island seemed rich with a profusion of all

grasses and low flowers. All delicate lowly things were most plentiful;

but no trees rose skywards, not even a bush overtopped the tall grasses,

except in one place near the cottage I am about to describe, where a few

plants of the gum-cistus, which drops every night all the blossoms that

the day brings forth, formed a kind of natural arbour. The whole island

lay open to the sky and sea. It rose nowhere more than a few feet above

the level of the waters, which flowed deep all around its border. Here

there seemed to be neither tide nor storm. A sense of persistent calm

and fulness arose in the mind at the sight of the slow, pulse-like rise

and fall of the deep, clear, unrippled waters against the bank of the

island, for shore it could hardly be called, being so much more like

the edge of a full, solemn river. As I walked over the grass towards the

cottage, which stood at a little distance from the bank, all the flowers

of childhood looked at me with perfect child-eyes out of the grass. My

heart, softened by the dreams through which it had passed, overflowed

in a sad, tender love towards them. They looked to me like children

impregnably fortified in a helpless confidence. The sun stood half-way

down the western sky, shining very soft and golden; and there grew a

second world of shadows amidst the world of grasses and wild flowers.

The cottage was square, with low walls, and a high pyramidal roof

thatched with long reeds, of which the withered blossoms hung over all

the eaves. It is noticeable that most of the buildings I saw in Fairy

Land were cottages. There was no path to a door, nor, indeed, was there

any track worn by footsteps in the island.

The cottage rose right out of the smooth turf. It had no windows that I

could see; but there was a door in the centre of the side facing me,

up to which I went. I knocked, and the sweetest voice I had ever heard

said, "Come in." I entered. A bright fire was burning on a hearth in

the centre of the earthern floor, and the smoke found its way out at an

opening in the centre of the pyramidal roof. Over the fire hung a little

pot, and over the pot bent a woman-face, the most wonderful, I thought,

that I had ever beheld. For it was older than any countenance I had ever

looked upon. There was not a spot in which a wrinkle could lie, where a

wrinkle lay not. And the skin was ancient and brown, like old parchment.