Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

"A spirit . . .

. . . . . .

The undulating and silent well,

And rippling rivulet, and evening gloom,

Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming,

Held commune with him; as if he and it

Were all that was."

SHELLEY'S Alastor.

I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies

the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern

window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing a cloud that

just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the approach of

the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently dreamless sleep had

dissolved, began again to assume crystalline forms, the strange events

of the foregoing night presented themselves anew to my wondering

consciousness. The day before had been my one-and-twentieth birthday.

Among other ceremonies investing me with my legal rights, the keys of an

old secretary, in which my father had kept his private papers, had been

delivered up to me. As soon as I was left alone, I ordered lights in the

chamber where the secretary stood, the first lights that had been there

for many a year; for, since my father's death, the room had been left

undisturbed.

But, as if the darkness had been too long an inmate to

be easily expelled, and had dyed with blackness the walls to which,

bat-like, it had clung, these tapers served but ill to light up the

gloomy hangings, and seemed to throw yet darker shadows into the hollows

of the deep-wrought cornice. All the further portions of the room lay

shrouded in a mystery whose deepest folds were gathered around the dark

oak cabinet which I now approached with a strange mingling of reverence

and curiosity. Perhaps, like a geologist, I was about to turn up to

the light some of the buried strata of the human world, with its fossil

remains charred by passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to

learn how my father, whose personal history was unknown to me, had woven

his web of story; how he had found the world, and how the world had left

him. Perhaps I was to find only the records of lands and moneys, how

gotten and how secured; coming down from strange men, and through

troublous times, to me, who knew little or nothing of them all. To solve

my speculations, and to dispel the awe which was fast gathering around

me as if the dead were drawing near, I approached the secretary; and

having found the key that fitted the upper portion, I opened it with

some difficulty, drew near it a heavy high-backed chair, and sat down

before a multitude of little drawers and slides and pigeon-holes. But

the door of a little cupboard in the centre especially attracted my

interest, as if there lay the secret of this long-hidden world. Its key

I found.