Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
communicate the discovery to my fellow men. With some books, however,
of this nature, it seemed rather as if the process was removed yet a
great way further back; and I was trying to find the root of a
manifestation, the spiritual truth whence a material vision sprang; or
to combine two propositions, both apparently true, either at once or in
different remembered moods, and to find the point in which their
invisibly converging lines would unite in one, revealing a truth higher
than either and differing from both; though so far from being opposed
to either, that it was that whence each derived its life and power. Or
if the book was one of travels, I found myself the traveller. New
lands, fresh experiences, novel customs, rose around me. I walked, I
discovered, I fought, I suffered, I rejoiced in my success. Was it a
history? I was the chief actor therein. I suffered my own blame; I was
glad in my own praise. With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the
whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like
myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of
years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of
the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the
consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around
me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book. If the book was a
poem, the words disappeared, or took the subordinate position of an
accompaniment to the succession of forms and images that rose and
vanished with a soundless rhythm, and a hidden rime.
In one, with a mystical title, which I cannot recall, I read of a world
that is not like ours. The wondrous account, in such a feeble,
fragmentary way as is possible to me, I would willingly impart. Whether
or not it was all a poem, I cannot tell; but, from the impulse I felt,
when I first contemplated writing it, to break into rime, to which
impulse I shall give way if it comes upon me again, I think it must
have been, partly at least, in verse.
CHAPTER XII
“Chained is the Spring. The night-wind bold
Blows over the hard earth;
Time is not more confused and cold,
Nor keeps more wintry mirth.
“Yet blow, and roll the world about;
Blow, Time—blow, winter’s Wind!
Through chinks of Time, heaven peepeth out,
And Spring the frost behind.”
G. E. M.
They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men,
are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the
heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an
external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be
without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of
all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of
the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is
already imbodied. The blank, which is only a forgotten life, lying
behind the consciousness, and the misty splendour, which is an
undeveloped life, lying before it, may be full of mysterious
revelations of other connexions with the worlds around us, than those
of science and poetry. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and
green glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the
hidden things of a man’s soul, and, it may be, with the secret history
of his body as well. They are portions of the living house wherein he
abides.
Through the realms of the monarch Sun
Creeps a world, whose course had begun,
On a weary path with a weary pace,
Before the Earth sprang forth on her race:
But many a time the Earth had sped
Around the path she still must tread,
Ere the elder planet, on leaden wing,
Once circled the court of the planet’s king.
There, in that lonely and distant star,
The seasons are not as our seasons are;
But many a year hath Autumn to dress
The trees in their matron loveliness;
As long hath old Winter in triumph to go
O’er beauties dead in his vaults below;
And many a year the Spring doth wear
Combing the icicles from her hair;
And Summer, dear Summer, hath years of June,
With large white clouds, and cool showers at noon:
And a beauty that grows to a weight like grief,
Till a burst of tears is the heart’s relief.
Children, born when Winter is king,
May never rejoice in the hoping Spring;
Though their own heart-buds are bursting with joy,
And the child hath grown to the girl or boy;
But may die with cold and icy hours
Watching them ever in place of flowers.
And some who awake from their primal sleep,
When the sighs of Summer through forests creep,
Live, and love, and are loved again;
Seek for pleasure, and find its pain;
Sink to their last, their forsaken sleeping,
With the same sweet odours around them creeping.
Now the children, there, are not born as the children are born in
worlds nearer to the sun. For they arrive no one knows how. A maiden,
walking alone, hears a cry: for even there a cry is the first
utterance; and searching about, she findeth, under an overhanging rock,
or within a clump of bushes, or, it may be, betwixt gray stones on the
side of a hill, or in any other sheltered and unexpected spot, a little
child. This she taketh tenderly, and beareth home with joy, calling
out, “Mother, mother”—if so be that her mother lives—“I have got a
baby—I have found a child!” All the household gathers round to
see;—“_Where is it? What is it like? Where did you find it?_” and
such-like questions, abounding. And thereupon she relates the whole
story of the discovery; for by the circumstances, such as season of the
year, time of the day, condition of the air, and such like, and,
especially, the peculiar and never-repeated aspect of the heavens and
earth at the time, and the nature of the place of shelter wherein it is
found, is determined, or at least indicated, the nature of the child
thus discovered. Therefore, at certain seasons, and in certain states
of the weather, according, in part, to their own fancy, the young women
go out to look for children. They generally avoid seeking them, though
they cannot help sometimes finding them, in places and with
circumstances uncongenial to their peculiar likings. But no sooner is a
child found, than its claim for protection and nurture obliterates all
feeling of choice in the matter. Chiefly, however, in the season of
summer, which lasts so long, coming as it does after such long
intervals; and mostly in the warm evenings, about the middle of
twilight; and principally in the woods and along the river banks, do
the maidens go looking for children just as children look for flowers.
And ever as the child grows, yea, more and more as he advances in
years, will his face indicate to those who understand the spirit of
Nature, and her utterances in the face of the world, the nature of the
place of his birth, and the other circumstances thereof; whether a
clear morning sun guided his mother to the nook whence issued the boy’s
low cry; or at eve the lonely maiden (for the same woman never finds a
second, at least while the first lives) discovers the girl by the
glimmer of her white skin, lying in a nest like that of the lark, amid
long encircling grasses, and the upward-gazing eyes of the lowly
daisies; whether the storm bowed the forest trees around, or the still
frost fixed in silence the else flowing and babbling stream.
After they grow up, the men and women are but little together. There is
this peculiar difference between them, which likewise distinguishes the
women from those of the earth. The men alone have arms; the women have
only wings. Resplendent wings are they, wherein they can shroud
themselves from head to foot in a panoply of glistering glory. By these
wings alone, it may frequently be judged in what seasons, and under
what aspects, they were born. From those that came in winter, go great
white wings, white as snow; the edge of every feather shining like the
sheen of silver, so that they flash and glitter like frost in the sun.
But underneath, they are tinged with a faint pink or rose-colour. Those
born in spring have wings of a brilliant green, green as grass; and
towards the edges the feathers are enamelled like the surface of the
grass-blades. These again are white within. Those that are born in
summer have wings of a deep rose-colour, lined with pale gold. And
those born in autumn have purple wings, with a rich brown on the
inside. But these colours are modified and altered in all varieties,
corresponding to the mood of the day and hour, as well as the season of
the year; and sometimes I found the various colours so intermingled,
that I could not determine even the season, though doubtless the
hieroglyphic could be deciphered by more experienced eyes. One
splendour, in particular, I remember—wings of deep carmine, with an
inner down of warm gray, around a form of brilliant whiteness.
She had been found as the sun went down through a low sea-fog, casting
crimson along a broad sea-path into a little cave on the shore, where a
bathing maiden saw her lying.
But though I speak of sun and fog, and sea and shore, the world there
is in some respects very different from the earth whereon men live. For
instance, the waters reflect no forms. To the unaccustomed eye they
appear, if undisturbed, like the surface of a dark metal, only that the
latter would reflect indistinctly, whereas they reflect not at all,
except light which falls immediately upon them. This has a great effect
in causing the landscapes to differ from those on the earth. On the
stillest evening, no tall ship on the sea sends a long wavering
reflection almost to the feet of him on shore; the face of no maiden
brightens at its own beauty in a still forest-well. The sun and moon
alone make a glitter on the surface. The sea is like a sea of death,
ready to ingulf and never to reveal: a visible shadow of oblivion. Yet
the women sport in its waters like gorgeous sea-birds. The men more
rarely enter them. But, on the contrary, the sky reflects everything
beneath it, as if it were built of water like ours. Of course, from its
concavity there is some distortion of the reflected objects; yet
wondrous combinations of form are often to be seen in the overhanging
depth. And then it is not shaped so much like a round dome as the sky
of the earth, but, more of an egg-shape, rises to a great towering
height in the middle, appearing far more lofty than the other. When the
stars come out at night, it shows a mighty cupola, “fretted with golden
fires,” wherein there is room for all tempests to rush and rave.
One evening in early summer, I stood with a group of men and women on a
steep rock that overhung the sea. They were all questioning me about my
world and the ways thereof. In making reply to one of their questions,
I was compelled to say that children are not born in the Earth as with
them. Upon this I was assailed with a whole battery of inquiries, which
at first I tried to avoid; but, at last, I was compelled, in the
vaguest manner I could invent, to make some approach to the subject in
question. Immediately a dim notion of what I meant, seemed to dawn in
the minds of most of the women. Some of them folded their great wings
all around them, as they generally do when in the least offended, and
stood erect and motionless. One spread out her rosy pinions, and
flashed from the promontory into the gulf at its foot. A great light
shone in the eyes of one maiden, who turned and walked slowly away,
with her purple and white wings half dispread behind her. She was
found, the next morning, dead beneath a withered tree on a bare
hill-side, some miles inland. They buried her where she lay, as is
their custom; for, before they die, they instinctively search for a
spot like the place of their birth, and having found one that satisfies