Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

Through my tears, the whole landscape glimmered in such bewildering

loveliness, that I felt as if I were entering Fairy Land for the first

time, and some loving hand were waiting to cool my head, and a loving

word to warm my heart. Roses, wild roses, everywhere! So plentiful were

they, they not only perfumed the air, they seemed to dye it a faint

rose-hue. The colour floated abroad with the scent, and clomb, and

spread, until the whole west blushed and glowed with the gathered

incense of roses. And my heart fainted with longing in my bosom.

Could I but see the Spirit of the Earth, as I saw once the in dwelling

woman of the beech-tree, and my beauty of the pale marble, I should be

content. Content!--Oh, how gladly would I die of the light of her eyes!

Yea, I would cease to be, if that would bring me one word of love from

the one mouth. The twilight sank around, and infolded me with sleep. I

slept as I had not slept for months. I did not awake till late in the

morning; when, refreshed in body and mind, I rose as from the death that

wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.

Again I followed the stream; now climbing a steep rocky bank that hemmed

it in; now wading through long grasses and wild flowers in its path; now

through meadows; and anon through woods that crowded down to the very

lip of the water.

At length, in a nook of the river, gloomy with the weight of overhanging

foliage, and still and deep as a soul in which the torrent eddies of

pain have hollowed a great gulf, and then, subsiding in violence, have

left it full of a motionless, fathomless sorrow--I saw a little boat

lying. So still was the water here, that the boat needed no fastening.

It lay as if some one had just stepped ashore, and would in a moment

return.

But as there were no signs of presence, and no track through the

thick bushes; and, moreover, as I was in Fairy Land where one does very

much as he pleases, I forced my way to the brink, stepped into the boat,

pushed it, with the help of the tree-branches, out into the stream,

lay down in the bottom, and let my boat and me float whither the stream

would carry us. I seemed to lose myself in the great flow of sky above

me unbroken in its infinitude, except when now and then, coming nearer

the shore at a bend in the river, a tree would sweep its mighty head

silently above mine, and glide away back into the past, never more to

fling its shadow over me. I fell asleep in this cradle, in which mother

Nature was rocking her weary child; and while I slept, the sun slept

not, but went round his arched way. When I awoke, he slept in the

waters, and I went on my silent path beneath a round silvery moon. And

a pale moon looked up from the floor of the great blue cave that lay in

the abysmal silence beneath.