Secure, for no alarming cranes molest,
And all their woes in long oblivion rest:
Down the deep vale, and narrow winding way,
They foot it featly, ranged in ringlets gay:
'Tis joy and frolic all, where'er they rove,
And fairy-people is the name they love.*

The wood-nymphs and the water-nymphs, Pan, Silenus, and their tribe, are often gross and corporeal-sometimes indeed, utterly disgusting beings.

The mythology of the Norsemen, born amid the ice-bound coasts and stormy tempests of the northern seas, differs very widely from the spirit-world of the English woods. One part of it converts the shipwright and the smith and the hardy sailor and the savage pirate chief into so many heroes and demigods; and it celebrated their feasts, their drinking and their revelry and their fights on land and on ship-board. Another part relates to the supernatural elves who haunt desolate places and, occasionally, the abodes of man, who form a connecting link between the human race and the world of spirits. It also relates wonderful stories of trolls and monsters and goblins, who sometimes exercise tyranny over man, and who sometimes are subdued by those possessed of magical arts. The legends of Scandinavia contain many stories which may be compared with the Tempest, with Ariel and the other spirits who obey the commands of Prospero; but they contain none which exhibit the exquisite beauty of the fairy land of the Midsummer-Night's Dream. Iceland, with its marvellous physical formation, calculated to produce unearthly impressions on credulous minds, with its jagged coasts, its volcanic mountains, its plains of lava, and its plains of ice, its boiling fountains, its long night of winter and its long day of summer,-possesses a literature which is, perhaps, richer in the supernatural than that of any other country; but it is

• Beattie's Pygmæo-Gerano-Machia.

rude and terrible and ghostly, and cannot fairly be compared with the charming fairy land of Shakspeare's greenwood.

The legends of the Red Indian, though in some respects very different, have in other respects a certain resemblance to the tales of the spirit land of England, because they attribute a spiritual source to the operations of nature, to the winds from the mountains, to the growth of plants, and to many of the arts of life. They connect the every-day life of man with the unseen world around him. Shakspeare ingrafts the beauties of nature on his fairy realm; in a somewhat similar manner Longfellow repeats the legends of the Red Man, which were found

In the bird's-nests of the forest,
In the lodges of the beaver,
In the hoof-prints of the bison,

In the eyry of the eagle!

For instance, we have the beautiful story of the chief who

Prayed and fasted in the forest,

For the profit of the people,
For advantage of the nations;

who then, "by struggle and by labour," overcomes a youth,

Dressed in garments green and yellow,

Plumes of green bent o'er his forehead,

and for his conflict and his conquest is rewarded by the Great Spirit the Master of Life-with the gift of maize.

Mondamin, the friend of man, Mondamin.

This story is an instance of the manner in which the half civilized man mingles the natural and the supernatural.

There is a certain weird character about the spirit world of North Britain. Warlocks and witches dancing around unearthly lights in the ruined kirk are the types of the superstitions of Scotland; even the Queen of Elfinland, who carried away Thomas the Rhymer, is one of the same ghostly character.

The imaginative, poetical sons of Erin have constructed a spirit world which, with its banshees and phoccas, and spirit horsemen, seems to combine the legends of Scotland with those of the English greenwood.

One of the spirits of Shakspeare's woodland, and one only, is of fearful form-in fact, a ghost condemned to haunt the forest; it is that of Herne the hunter

Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,

Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,

Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle;

And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.*

One characteristic of the fairy tribe is the marvellous extent of their powers, and the contrast between their ordinary pastimes and the tasks they can perform-the earth, the air, the seas, the tempests and the bolts of heaven, are all controlled by them; and they again are guided by the magician's still more potent art. Prospero thus addresses them:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him,
When he comes back; you demy-puppets, that
By moon-shine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight-mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
(Weak masters though you be) I have be-dimm'd
The noon-tide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt: the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck'd up

The pine, and cedar; graves, at my command,

Have wak'd their sleepers; oped, and led them forth
By my so potent art.+

The diminutive size of the fairies is always preserved

indeed, it is one of the chief elements of their beauty, so different from the elves, "the eighteen-inch militia" of other lands. When Bottom finds his way to the bower of Titania, the lovesick fairy queen commands her various spirits to wait on him. One of them, Cobweb (the name shows how well he was acquainted with the wiles of the enemies of the hive), was ordered to bring him a honey-bag. The weaver tells him, "Good Monsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not; I "would be loath to have you overflown with a honey-bag, Signior." In the account of the quarrel between Titania and Oberon, we find

66

That all their elves, for fear,

Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there.

Again, Titania tells her love

I have a venturous fairy that shall seek

The squirrel's hoard, and fetch thee new nuts.+

It was a venturous task, evidently more than an ordinary feat for a fairy. But in every passage we shall find what tiny people they are. The first individual spirit I shall mention is Ariel, the "dainty Ariel," the delicate spirit who obeys the commands of a human master, in gratitude for his deliverance from the sorceries of the vile witch Sycorax. He has power over the winds and the breezes, even over the forked bolt of heaven and over the stormy seas, as he says—

I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement: Sometimes, I'd divide,

And burn in many places; on the topmast,

The yards, and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet, and join: Jove's lightnings, the precursors

O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary

And sight-outrunning were not.‡

These various tasks form a curious contrast to the song in

* Midsummer-Night's Dream, Act ii, Scene 1. Tempest, Act i, Scene 2.

+ Ibid, Act iv, Scene 1.

F

which he describes his haunts and occupations. From the latter we should suppose he was no larger than a hummingbird.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

In a cowslip's bell I lie:

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat's back I do fly,

After summer merrily:

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.*

Another of Shakspeare's spirits is Queen Mab, the inspirer of dreams. The description occurs in Romeo and Juliet; and it is curious that in that love tale of Verona, he brings in a creation of the woody glades of Warwickshire—an Italian courtier relating an English legend. She is said to

Gallop night by night

Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love :

O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees:

O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail,
Tickling a parson's nose as 'a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice.+

But the lines describing the equipage of this queen of dreams are by far the most beautiful part of this passage :

She comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep :

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;

The traces, of the smallest spider's web;

The collars, of the moonshine's watery beams:

Her whip, of cricket's bone: the lash, of film :
Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid:
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies' coach-makers.‡

-

+ Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 4.