vailed
for weeks. Fever and delirium are upon him. Suddenly from his restless
hammock he starts up; he will fret no longer in darkness; he ascends
upon deck. How motionless are the deeps! How vast--how sweet are these
shining zaarrahs of water! He gazes, and slowly under the blazing
scenery of his brain the scenery of his eye unsettles. The waters are
swallowed up; the seas have disappeared. Green fields appear, a silent
dell, and a pastoral cottage. Two faces appear--are at the door--sweet
female faces, and behold they beckon him. 'Come to us!' they seem to
say. The picture rises to his wearied brain like a _sanctus_ from the
choir of a cathedral, and in the twinkling of an eye, stung to madness
by the cravings of his heart, the man is overboard. He is gone--he is
lost for this world; but if he missed the arms of the lovely women--wife
and sister--whom he sought, assuredly he has settled into arms that are
mightier and not less indulgent.

I, young as I was, had one feeling not learned from books, and that
_could_ not have been learned from books, the deepest of all that
connect themselves with natural scenery. It is the feeling which in 'The
Hart-leap Well' of Wordsworth, in his 'Danish Boy,' and other exquisite
poems is brought out, viz., the breathless, mysterious, Pan-like silence
that haunts the noon-day. If there were winds abroad, then I was roused
myself into sympathetic tumults. But if this dead silence haunted the
air, then the peace which was in nature echoed another peace which lay
in graves, and I fell into a sick languishing for things which a voice
from heaven seemed to say '_cannot_ be granted.'

There is a German superstition, which eight or ten years after I read,
of the Erl-king and his daughter. The daughter had power to tempt
infants away into the invisible world; but it is, as the reader
understands, by collusion with some infirmity of sick desire for such
worlds in the infant itself.

'Who is that rides through the forest so fast?'

It is a knight who carries his infant upon his saddle-bow. The
Erl-king's daughter rides by his side; and, in words audible only when
she means them to be heard, she says:

'If thou wilt, dear baby, with me go away,
We will see a fine show, we will play a fine play.'

That sounds lovely to my ears. Oh yes, that collusion with dim sleeping
infancy is lovely to me; but I was too advanced in intellect to have
been tempted by _such_ temptations. Still