nia?--Mab? _Without a motive?_ Where the godmother of the
sweet-faced and sweet-hearted Cinderella? Partial, and without a
distinct type in your own recollections, you guessingly pronounce the
characterization of the perpetual secretary too----_French_. Driven
back, disappointed on all sides, you turn round upon your difficulties,
and manfully project beating out _a definition of your own_; to which
end, glancing your eye back affectionately, and now, needle-like,
northwards across the Channel, you "at one slight bound" once more find
yourself at your own fireside, and on your table _The Midsummer Night's
Dream_, open at the second scene of the first act.

Inquirer whosoever! A problem lies large before us--complicated,
abstruse even, yet--suitably to the subject--a delicate one! To hunt
down an elusive word, and a more elusive notion! It is to find a set of
determinings which, laid together, shall form a circle fitted to confine
that inconfinable spirit--a Fairy; or, if you better like plain English,
to find the terms needed for signifying, describing, expounding the
Thought which, lurking as at the bottom of your mind, under a crowd of
thoughts, rises up, in all circumstances, to meet and answer the
name----a fairy; the Thought, which when all accidental and unessential
attributes liable to be attracted to the fairy essence have been
stripped away, remains; the _substrate_, absolute, essential, _generic_
notion, therefore--a fairy; that Thought, which whencesoever acquired,
and held howsoever, enables you to deal to your satisfaction with
proposed fairies, acknowledging THIS one frankly;--THIS, but for a
half-sister; shutting the door upon ANOTHER. You may distinguish these
terms at your pleasure, by sundry denominations: for example, you may
call them Elements of the notion--a fairy--or circumscriptive Lines of
such a notion, or indispensable Fairy-marks, or elfin Criteria, or by
any other name which you may happen to like as well or better; but when
found, call them as you will, they must reveal in essence, the thing
which we look for--the answer to the question with which we first
started, and to which we have as yet found no satisfactory solution.

As for the process of the finding. This notion is to be tracked after
widely, and in intimate recesses; more hopefully, therefore, according
to a planned campaign than a merely wild chance expatiation. The chase
ranges over a material and an intellectual ground. Of eith