ring
loveliness, that I felt as if I were entering Fairy Land for the first
time, and some loving hand were waiting to cool my head, and a loving
word to warm my heart. Roses, wild roses, everywhere! So plentiful were
they, they not only perfumed the air, they seemed to dye it a faint
rose-hue. The colour floated abroad with the scent, and clomb, and
spread, until the whole west blushed and glowed with the gathered
incense of roses. And my heart fainted with longing in my bosom.

Could I but see the Spirit of the Earth, as I saw once the in dwelling
woman of the beech-tree, and my beauty of the pale marble, I should be
content. Content!--Oh, how gladly would I die of the light of her eyes!
Yea, I would cease to be, if that would bring me one word of love from
the one mouth. The twilight sank around, and infolded me with sleep. I
slept as I had not slept for months. I did not awake till late in the
morning; when, refreshed in body and mind, I rose as from the death that
wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.
Again I followed the stream; now climbing a steep rocky bank that hemmed
it in; now wading through long grasses and wild flowers in its path; now
through meadows; and anon through woods that crowded down to the very
lip of the water.

At length, in a nook of the river, gloomy with the weight of overhanging
foliage, and still and deep as a soul in which the torrent eddies of
pain have hollowed a great gulf, and then, subsiding in violence, have
left it full of a motionless, fathomless sorrow--I saw a little boat
lying. So still was the water here, that the boat needed no fastening.
It lay as if some one had just stepped ashore, and would in a moment
return. But as there were no signs of presence, and no track through the
thick bushes; and, moreover, as I was in Fairy Land where one does very
much as he pleases, I forced my way to the brink, stepped into the boat,
pushed it, with the help of the tree-branches, out into the stream,
lay down in the bottom, and let my boat and me float whither the stream
would carry us. I seemed to lose myself in the great flow of sky above
me unbroken in its infinitude, except when now and then, coming nearer
the shore at a bend in the river, a tree would sweep its mighty head
silently above mine, and glide away back into the past, never more to
fling its shadow over me. I fell asleep in this cradle, in which mother
Nature was rocking her weary child; and