The Pilgrims of the Rhine

“My child,” said Vane, “so think women when they read a tale of love, and see the whole heart bared before them; but not so act they in real life, when they see only the surface of character, and pierce not its depths—until it is too late!”

CHAPTER XXV. THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.—A COMMON INCIDENT NOT BEFORE

DESCRIBED.—TREVYLYAN AND GERTRUDE.

THE day now grew cool as it waned to its decline, and the breeze came sharp upon the delicate frame of the sufferer. They resolved to proceed no farther; and as they carried with them attendants and baggage, which rendered their route almost independent of the ordinary accommodation, they steered for the opposite shore, and landed at a village beautifully sequestered in a valley, and where they fortunately obtained a lodging not often met with in the regions of the picturesque.

When Gertrude, at an early hour, retired to bed, Vane and Du–e fell into speculative conversation upon the nature of man. Vane’s philosophy was of a quiet and passive scepticism; the physician dared more boldly, and rushed from doubt to negation. The attention of Trevylyan, as he sat apart and musing, was arrested in despite of himself. He listened to an argument in which he took no share, but which suddenly inspired him with an interest in that awful subject which, in the heat of youth and the occupations of the world, had never been so prominently called forth before.

“What,” thought he, with unutterable anguish, as he listened to the earnest vehemence of the Frenchman and the tranquil assent of Vane, “if this creed were indeed true,—if there be no other world,—Gertrude is lost to me eternally, through the dread gloom of death there would break forth no star!”

That is a peculiar incident that perhaps occurs to us all at times, but which I have never found expressed in books, namely, to hear a doubt of futurity at the very moment in which the present is most overcast; and to find at once this world stripped of its delusion and the next of its consolation. It is perhaps for others, rather than ourselves, that the fond heart requires a Hereafter. The tranquil rest, the shadow, and the silence, the mere pause of the wheel of life, have no terror for the wise, who know the due value of the world.

“After the billows of a stormy sea,
Sweet is at last the haven of repose!”

But not so when that stillness is to divide us eternally from others; when those we have loved with all the passion, the devotion, the watchful sanctity of the weak human heart, are to exist to us no more! when, after long years of desertion and widowhood on earth, there is to be no hope of reunion in that INVISIBLE beyond the stars; when the torch, not of life only, but of love, is to be quenched in the Dark Fountain, and the grave, that we would fain hope is the great restorer of broken ties, is but the dumb seal of hopeless, utter, inexorable separation! And it is this thought, this sentiment, which makes religion out of woe, and teaches belief to the mourning heart that in the gladness of united affections felt not the necessity of a heaven! To how many is the death of the beloved the parent of faith!

Stung by his thoughts, Trevylyan rose abruptly, and stealing from the lowly hostelry, walked forth amidst the serene and deepening night; from the window of Gertrude’s room the light streamed calm on the purple air.

With uneven steps and many a pause, he paced to and fro beneath the window, and gave the rein to his thoughts. How intensely he felt the ALL that Gertrude was to him! how bitterly he foresaw the change in his lot and character that her death would work out! For who that met him in later years ever dreamed that emotions so soft, and yet so ardent, had visited one so stern? Who could have believed that time was when the polished and cold Trevylyan had kept the vigils he now held below the chamber of one so little like himself as Gertrude, in that remote and solitary hamlet; shut in by the haunted mountains of the Rhine, and beneath the moonlight of the romantic North?

While thus engaged, the light in Gertrude’s room was suddenly extinguished; it is impossible to express how much that trivial incident affected him! It was like an emblem of what was to come; the light had been the only evidence of life that broke upon that hour, and he was now left alone with the shades of night. Was not this like the herald of Gertrude’s own death; the extinction of the only living ray that broke upon the darkness of the world?

His anguish, his presentiment of utter desolation, increased. He groaned aloud; he dashed his clenched hand to his breast; large and cold drops of agony stole down his brow. “Father,” he exclaimed with a struggling voice, “let this cup pass from me! Smite my ambition to the root; curse me with poverty, shame, and bodily disease; but leave me this one solace, this one companion of my fate!”

At this moment Gertrude’s window opened gently, and he heard accents steal soothingly upon his ear.

“Is not that your voice, Albert?” said she, softly. “I heard it just as I lay down to rest, and could not sleep while you were thus exposed to the damp night air. You do not answer; surely it is your voice: when did I mistake it for another’s?” Mastering with a violent effort his emotions, Trevylyan answered, with a sort of convulsive gayety,—

“Why come to these shores, dear Gertrude, unless you are honoured with the chivalry that belongs to them? What wind, what blight, can harm me while within the circle of your presence; and what sleep can bring me dreams so dear as the waking thought of you?”

“It is cold,” said Gertrude, shivering; “come in, dear Albert, I beseech you, and I will thank you to-morrow.” Gertrude’s voice was choked by the hectic cough, that went like an arrow to Trevylyan’s heart; and he felt that in her anxiety for him she was now exposing her own frame to the unwholesome night.

He spoke no more, but hurried within the house; and when the gray light of morn broke upon his gloomy features, haggard from the want of sleep, it might have seemed, in that dim eye and fast-sinking cheek, as if the lovers were not to be divided—even by death itself.

CHAPTER XXVI. IN WHICH THE READER WILL LEARN HOW THE FAIRIES WERE

RECEIVED BY THE SOVEREIGNS OF THE MINES.—THE COMPLAINT OF THE LAST OF THE FAUNS.—THE RED HUNTSMAN.—THE STORM.—DEATH.

IN the deep valley of Ehrenthal, the metal kings—the Prince of the Silver Palaces, the Gnome Monarch of the dull Lead Mine, the President of the Copper United States—held a court to receive the fairy wanderers from the island of Nonnewerth.

The prince was there, in a gallant hunting-suit of oak leaves, in honour to England; and wore a profusion of fairy orders, which had been instituted from time to time, in honour of the human poets that had celebrated the spiritual and ethereal tribes. Chief of these, sweet Dreamer of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” was the badge crystallized from the dews that rose above the whispering reeds of Avon on the night of thy birth,—the great epoch of the intellectual world! Nor wert thou, O beloved Musaeus! nor thou, dim-dreaming Tieck! nor were ye, the wild imaginer of the bright-haired Undine, and the wayward spirit that invoked for the gloomy Manfred the Witch of the breathless Alps and the spirits of earth and air!—nor were ye without the honours of fairy homage! Your memory may fade from the heart of man, and the spells of new enchanters may succeed to the charm you once wove over the face of the common world; but still in the green knolls of the haunted valley and the deep shade of forests, and the starred palaces of air, ye are honoured by the beings of your dreams, as demigods and kings! Your graves are tended by invisible hands, and the places of your birth are hallowed by no perishable worship!

Even as I write,[13 - It was just at the time the author was finishing this work that the great master of his art was drawing to the close of his career.] far away amidst the hills of Scotland, and by the forest thou hast clothed with immortal verdure, thou, the maker of “the Harp by lone Glenfillan’s spring,” art passing from the earth which thou hast “painted with delight.” And such are the chances of mortal fame, our children’s children may raise new idols on the site of thy holy altar, and cavil where their sires adored; but for thee the mermaid of the ocean shall wail in her coral caves, and the sprite that lives in the waterfalls shall mourn! Strange shapes shall hew thy monument in the recesses of the lonely rocks! ever by moonlight shall the fairies pause from their roundel when some wild note of their minstrelsy reminds them of thine own,—ceasing from their revelries, to weep for the silence of that mighty lyre, which breathed alike a revelation of the mysteries of spirits and of men!

The King of the Silver Mines sat in a cavern in the valley, through which the moonlight pierced its way and slept in shadow on the soil shining with metals wrought into unnumbered shapes; and below him, on a humbler throne, with a gray beard and downcast eye, sat the aged King of the Dwarfs that preside over the dull realms of lead, and inspire the verse of –, and the prose of –! And there too a fantastic household elf was the President of the Copper Republic,—a spirit that loves economy and the Uses, and smiles sparely on the Beautiful. But, in the centre of the cave, upon beds of the softest mosses, the untrodden growth of ages, reclined the fairy visitors, Nymphalin seated by her betrothed. And round the walls of the cave were dwarf attendants on the sovereigns of the metals, of a thousand odd shapes and fantastic garments. On the abrupt ledges of the rocks the bats, charmed to stillness but not sleep, clustered thickly, watching the scene with fixed and amazed eyes; and one old gray owl, the favourite of the witch of the valley, sat blinking in a corner, listening with all her might that she might bring home the scandal to her mistress.

“And tell me, Prince of the Rhine-Island Fays,” said the King of the Silver Mines, “for thou art a traveller, and a fairy that hath seen much, how go men’s affairs in the upper world? As to ourself, we live here in a stupid splendour, and only hear the news of the day when our brother of lead pays a visit to the English printing-press, or the President of Copper goes to look at his improvements in steam-engines.”

“Indeed,” replied Fayzenheim, preparing to speak like AEneas in the Carthaginian court,—“indeed, your Majesty, I know not much that will interest you in the present aspect of mortal affairs, except that you are quite as much honoured at this day as when the Roman conqueror bent his knee to you among the mountains of Taunus; and a vast number of little round subjects of yours are constantly carried about by the rich, and pined after with hopeless adoration by the poor. But, begging your Majesty’s pardon, may I ask what has become of your cousin, the King of the Golden Mines? I know very well that he has no dominion in these valleys, and do not therefore wonder at his absence from your court this night; but I see so little of his subjects on earth that I should fear his empire was well nigh at an end, if I did not recognize everywhere the most servile homage paid to a power now become almost invisible.”

The King of the Silver Mines fetched a deep sigh. “Alas, prince,” said he, “too well do you divine the expiration of my cousin’s empire. So many of his subjects have from time to time gone forth to the world, pressed into military service and never returning, that his kingdom is nearly depopulated. And he lives far off in the distant parts of the earth, in a state of melancholy seclusion; the age of gold has passed, the age of paper has commenced.”

“Paper,” said Nymphalin, who was still somewhat of a precieuse,—“paper is a wonderful thing. What pretty books the human people write upon it!”

“Ah! that’s what I design to convey,” said the silver king. “It is the age less of paper money than paper government: the Press is the true bank.” The lord treasurer of the English fairies pricked up his ears at the word “bank;” for he was the Attwood of the fairies: he had a favourite plan of making money out of bulrushes, and had written four large bees’-wings full upon the true nature of capital.

While they were thus conversing, a sudden sound as of some rustic and rude music broke along the air, and closing its wild burden, they heard the following song:—

THE COMPLAINT OF THE LAST FAUN.

I. The moon on the Latmos mountain  Her pining vigil keeps;
And ever the silver fountain  In the Dorian valley weeps.
But gone are Endymion’s dreams;  And the crystal lymph
Bewails the nymph
Whose beauty sleeked the streams!
II. Round Arcady’s oak its green  The Bromian ivy weaves;
But no more is the satyr seen  Laughing out from the glossy leaves.
Hushed is the Lycian lute,  Still grows the seed
Of the Moenale reed,
But the pipe of Pan is mute!
III. The leaves in the noon-day quiver;  The vines on the mountains wave;
And Tiber rolls his river  As fresh by the Sylvan’s cave.
But my brothers are dead and gone;  And far away
From their graves I stray,
And dream of the past alone!
IV. And the sun of the north is chill;  And keen is the northern gale;
Alas for the Song of the Argive hill;  And the dance in the Cretan vale!
The youth of the earth is o’er,  And its breast is rife
With the teeming life
Of the golden Tribes no more!
V. My race are more blest than I,  Asleep in their distant bed;
‘T were better, be sure, to die  Than to mourn for the buried Dead:
To rove by the stranger streams,  At dusk and dawn
A lonely faun,
The last of the Grecian’s dreams.

As the song ended a shadow crossed the moonlight, that lay white and lustrous before the aperture of the cavern; and Nymphalin, looking up, beheld a graceful yet grotesque figure standing on the sward without, and gazing on the group in the cave. It was a shaggy form, with a goat’s legs and ears; but the rest of its body, and the height of the stature, like a man’s. An arch, pleasant, yet malicious smile played about its lips; and in its hand it held the pastoral pipe of which poets have sung,—they would find it difficult to sing to it!

“And who art thou?” said Fayzenheim, with the air of a hero.

“I am the last lingering wanderer of the race which the Romans worshipped; hither I followed their victorious steps, and in these green hollows have I remained. Sometimes in the still noon, when the leaves of spring bud upon the whispering woods, I peer forth from my rocky lair, and startle the peasant with my strange voice and stranger shape. Then goes he home, and puzzles his thick brain with mopes and fancies, till at length he imagines me, the creature of the South! one of his northern demons, and his poets adapt the apparition to their barbarous lines.”

“Ho!” quoth the silver king, “surely thou art the origin of the fabled Satan of the cowled men living whilom in yonder ruins, with its horns and goatish limbs; and the harmless faun has been made the figuration of the most implacable of fiends. But why, O wanderer of the South, lingerest thou in these foreign dells? Why returnest thou not to the bi-forked hill-top of old Parnassus, or the wastes around the yellow course of the Tiber?”

“My brethren are no more,” said the poor faun; “and the very faith that left us sacred and unharmed is departed. But here all the spirits not of mortality are still honoured; and I wander, mourning for Silenus, though amidst the vines that should console me for his loss.”