Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

After this, I repaired every morning to the same hall; where I sometimes

sat in the chair and dreamed deliciously, and sometimes walked up and

down over the black floor. Sometimes I acted within myself a whole

drama, during one of these perambulations; sometimes walked deliberately

through the whole epic of a tale; sometimes ventured to sing a song,

though with a shrinking fear of I knew not what. I was astonished at

the beauty of my own voice as it rang through the place, or rather crept

undulating, like a serpent of sound, along the walls and roof of this

superb music-hall. Entrancing verses arose within me as of their own

accord, chanting themselves to their own melodies, and requiring no

addition of music to satisfy the inward sense. But, ever in the pauses

of these, when the singing mood was upon me, I seemed to hear something

like the distant sound of multitudes of dancers, and felt as if it

was the unheard music, moving their rhythmic motion, that within me

blossomed in verse and song. I felt, too, that could I but see the

dance, I should, from the harmony of complicated movements, not of

the dancers in relation to each other merely, but of each dancer

individually in the manifested plastic power that moved the consenting

harmonious form, understand the whole of the music on the billows of

which they floated and swung.

At length, one night, suddenly, when this feeling of dancing came upon

me, I bethought me of lifting one of the crimson curtains, and looking

if, perchance, behind it there might not be hid some other mystery,

which might at least remove a step further the bewilderment of the

present one. Nor was I altogether disappointed. I walked to one of the

magnificent draperies, lifted a corner, and peeped in. There, burned

a great, crimson, globe-shaped light, high in the cubical centre of

another hall, which might be larger or less than that in which I stood,

for its dimensions were not easily perceived, seeing that floor and roof

and walls were entirely of black marble.

The roof was supported by the same arrangement of pillars radiating in

arches, as that of the first hall; only, here, the pillars and

arches were of dark red. But what absorbed my delighted gaze, was an

innumerable assembly of white marble statues, of every form, and in

multitudinous posture, filling the hall throughout. These stood, in the

ruddy glow of the great lamp, upon pedestals of jet black. Around the

lamp shone in golden letters, plainly legible from where I stood, the

two words-TOUCH NOT!