I wander, mourning for Silenus, though
amidst the vines that should console me for his loss."

"Thou hast known great beings in thy day," said the leaden king, who
loved the philosophy of a truism (and the history of whose inspirations
I shall one day write).

"Ah, yes," said the faun; "my birth was amidst the freshness of the
world, when the flush of the universal life coloured all things with
divinity; when not a tree but had its Dryad, not a fountain that was
without its Nymph. I sat by the gray throne of Saturn, in his old age,
ere yet he was discrowned (for he was no visionary ideal, but the arch
monarch of the pastoral age), and heard from his lips the history of the
world's birth. But those times are gone forever,--they have left harsh
successors."

"It is the age of paper," muttered the lord treasurer, shaking his head.

"What ho, for a dance!" cried Fayzenheim, too royal for moralities, and
he whirled the beautiful Nymphalin into a waltz. Then forth issued the
fairies, and out went the dwarfs. And the faun leaning against an aged
elm, ere yet the midnight waned, the elves danced their charmed round
to the antique minstrelsy of his pipe,--the minstrelsy of the Grecian
world!

"Hast thou seen yet, my Nymphalin," said Fayzenheim, in the pauses of
the dance, "the recess of the Hartz, and the red form of its mighty
hunter?"

"It is a fearful sight," answered Nymphalin; "but with thee I should not
fear."

"Away then!" cried Fayzenheim; "let us away at the first cock-crow, into
those shaggy dells; for there is no need of night to conceal us, and the
unwitnessed blush of morn or the dreary silence of noon is, no less than
the moon's reign, the season for the sports of the superhuman tribes."

Nymphalin, charmed with the proposal, readily assented; and at the last
hour of night, bestriding the starbeams of the many-titled Friga, away
sped the fairy cavalcade to the gloom of the mystic Hartz.

Fain would I relate the manner of their arrival in the thick recesses
of the forest,--how they found the Red Hunter seated on a fallen pine
beside a wide chasm in the earth, with the arching bows of the wizard
oak wreathing above his head as a canopy, and his bow and spear lying
idle at his feet. Fain would I tell of the reception which he deigned to
the fairies, and how he told them of his ancient victories over man; how
he chafed at the gathering invasions of his realm; and how joyously he
gloated of some great convul