Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

There I found that it communicated with a circular corridor, divided

from it only by two rows of red columns. This corridor, which was black,

with red niches holding statues, ran entirely about the statue-halls,

forming a communication between the further ends of them all; further,

that is, as regards the central hall of white whence they all diverged

like radii, finding their circumference in the corridor.

Round this corridor I now went, entering all the halls, of which there

were twelve, and finding them all similarly constructed, but filled with

quite various statues, of what seemed both ancient and modern sculpture.

After I had simply walked through them, I found myself sufficiently

tired to long for rest, and went to my own room.

In the night I dreamed that, walking close by one of the curtains, I was

suddenly seized with the desire to enter, and darted in. This time I was

too quick for them. All the statues were in motion, statues no longer,

but men and women--all shapes of beauty that ever sprang from the brain

of the sculptor, mingled in the convolutions of a complicated dance.

Passing through them to the further end, I almost started from my

sleep on beholding, not taking part in the dance with the others, nor

seemingly endued with life like them, but standing in marble coldness

and rigidity upon a black pedestal in the extreme left corner--my lady

of the cave; the marble beauty who sprang from her tomb or her cradle

at the call of my songs. While I gazed in speechless astonishment and

admiration, a dark shadow, descending from above like the curtain of a

stage, gradually hid her entirely from my view. I felt with a shudder

that this shadow was perchance my missing demon, whom I had not seen for

days. I awoke with a stifled cry.

Of course, the next evening I began my journey through the halls (for I

knew not to which my dream had carried me), in the hope of proving the

dream to be a true one, by discovering my marble beauty upon her black

pedestal. At length, on reaching the tenth hall, I thought I

recognised some of the forms I had seen dancing in my dream; and to my

bewilderment, when I arrived at the extreme corner on the left, there

stood, the only one I had yet seen, a vacant pedestal. It was exactly in

the position occupied, in my dream, by the pedestal on which the white

lady stood. Hope beat violently in my heart.

"Now," said I to myself, "if yet another part of the dream would but

come true, and I should succeed in surprising these forms in their

nightly dance; it might be the rest would follow, and I should see on

the pedestal my marble queen. Then surely if my songs sufficed to give

her life before, when she lay in the bonds of alabaster, much more would

they be sufficient then to give her volition and motion, when she alone

of assembled crowds of marble forms, would be standing rigid and cold."