Fiona Macleod.

LORELEI

"Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Dass ich so traurig bin;
Ein Maerchen aus alten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.

* * * * *

Die schoenste Jungfrau sitzet
Dort oben wunderbar,
Ihr gold'nes Geschmeide blitzet,
Sie kaemmt ihr gold'nes Haar.

Sie kaemmt es mit gold'nem Kamme,
Und singt ein Lied dabei;
Das hat eine wundersame,
Gewaltige Melodei."

Heine.

In every land, North and South, East and West, from sea to sea, myth
and legend hand down to us as cruel and malignant creatures, who
ceaselessly seek to slay man's body and to destroy his soul, the
half-human children of the restless sea and of the fiercely running
streams.

In Scotland and in Australia, in every part of Europe, we have tales
of horrible formless things which frequent lonely rivers and lochs and
marshes, and to meet which must mean Death. And equal in malignity
with them, and infinitely more dangerous, are the beautiful beings who
would seem to claim descent from Lilith, the soulless wife of Adam.

Such were the sirens who would have compassed the destruction of
Odysseus. Such are the mermaids, to wed with one of whom must bring
unutterable woe upon any of the sons of men. In lonely far-off places
by the sea there still are tales of exquisite melodies heard in the
gloaming, or at night when the moon makes a silver pathway across the
water; still are there stories of women whose home is in the depths of
the ocean, and who come to charm away men's souls by their beauty and
by their pitiful longing for human love.

Those who have looked on the yellow-green waters of the Seine, or who
have seen the more turbid, more powerful Thames sweeping her serious,
majestic way down towards the open ocean, at Westminster, or at London
Bridge, can perhaps realise something of that inwardness of things
that made the people of the past, and that makes the mentally
uncontrolled people of the present, feel a fateful power calling upon
them to listen to the insistence of the exacting waters, and to
surrender their lives and their souls forever to a thing that called
and which would brook no denial. In the Morgue, or in a mortuary by
the river-side, their poor bodies have lain when the rivers have
worked their will with them, and "Suicide," "Death by drowning," or
"By Misadventure" have been the verdicts given. We live in a too