The Pilgrims of the Rhine

CHAPTER XXV

THE IMMORTALITY OFTHE SOUL. —ACOMMON INCIDENT NOT BEFORE DESCRIBED. — TREVYLYAN AND GERTRUDE.

The day now grew cool as it waned to its decline, and the breeze came sharp upon the delicate frame of the sufferer. They resolved to proceed no farther; and as they carried with them attendants and baggage, which rendered their route almost independent of the ordinary accommodation, they steered for the opposite shore, and landed at a village beautifully sequestered in a valley, and where they fortunately obtained a lodging not often met with in the regions of the picturesque.

When Gertrude, at an early hour, retired to bed, Vane and Du-e fell into speculative conversation upon the nature of man. Vane’s philosophy was of a quiet and passive scepticism; the physician dared more boldly, and rushed from doubt to negation. The attention of Trevylyan, as he sat apart and musing, was arrested in despite of himself. He listened to an argu-

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ment in which he took no share, but which suddenly inspired him with an interest in that awful subject which, in the heat of youth and the occupations of the world, had never been so prominently called forth before.

“What,” thought he, with unutterable anguish, as he listened to the earnest vehemence of the Frenchman and the tranquil assent of Vane, “if this creed were indeed true, — if there be no other world, — Gertrude is lost to me eternally, through the dread gloom of death there would break forth no star!”

That is a peculiar incident that perhaps occurs to us all at times, but which I have never found expressed in books, namely, to hear a doubt of futurity at the very moment in which the present is most overcast; and to find at once this world stripped of its delusion and the next of its consolation. It is perhaps for others, rather than ourselves, that the fond heart requires a Hereafter. The tranquil rest, the shadow, and the silence, the mere pause of the wheel of life, have no terror for the wise, who know the due value of the world.

“After the billows of a stormy sea, Sweet is at last the haven of repose!”

But not so when that stillness is to divide us eternally from others; when those we have loved with all the passion, the devotion, the watchful sanctity of the weak human heart, are to exist to us no more! when, after long years of desertion and widowhood on earth, there is to be no hope of reunion in that INVISIBLE beyond the stars; when the torch, not of life

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only, but of love, is to be quenched in the Dark Fountain, and the grave, that we would fain hope is the great restorer of broken ties, is but the dumb seal of hopeless, utter, inexorable separation! And it is this thought, this sentiment, which makes religion out of woe, and teaches belief to the mourning heart that in the gladness of united affections felt not the necessity of a heaven! To how many is the death of the beloved the parent of faith!

Stung by his thoughts, Trevylyan rose abruptly, and stealing from the lowly hostelry, walked forth amidst the serene and deepening night; from the window of Gertrude’s room the light streamed calm on the purple air.

With uneven steps and many a pause, he paced to and fro beneath the window, and gave the rein to his thoughts. How intensely he felt the ALL that Gertrude was to him! how bitterly he foresaw the change in his lot and character that her death would work out! For who that met him in later years ever dreamed that emotions so soft, and yet so ardent, had visited one so stern? Who could have believed that time was when the polished and cold Trevylyan had kept the vigils he now held below the chamber of one so little like himself as Gertrude, in that remote and solitary hamlet; shut in by the haunted mountains of the Rhine, and beneath the moonlight of the romantic North?

While thus engaged, the light in Gertrude’s room was suddenly extinguished; it is impossible to express how much that trivial incident affected him! It was like an emblem of what was to come; the light had been the only evidence of life

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that broke upon that hour, and he was now left alone with the shades of night. Was not this like the herald of Gertrude’s own death; the extinction of the only living ray that broke upon the darkness of the world?

His anguish, his presentiment of utter desolation, increased. He groaned aloud; he dashed his clenched hand to his breast; large and cold drops of agony stole down his brow. “Father,” he exclaimed with a struggling voice, “let this cup pass from me! Smite my ambition to the root; curse me with poverty, shame, and bodily disease; but leave me this one solace, this one companion of my fate!”

At this moment Gertrude’s window opened gently, and he heard accents steal soothingly upon his ear.

“Is not that your voice, Albert?” said she, softly. “I heard it just as I lay down to rest, and could not sleep while you were thus exposed to the damp night air. You do not answer; surely it is your voice: when did I mistake it for another’s?” Mastering with a violent effort his emotions, Trevylyan answered, with a sort of convulsive gayety, —

“Why come to these shores, dear Gertrude, unless you are honoured with the chivalry that belongs to them? What wind, what blight, can harm me while within the circle of your presence; and what sleep can bring me dreams so dear as the waking thought of you?”

“It is cold,” said Gertrude, shivering; “come in, dear Albert, I beseech you, and I will thank you to-morrow.” Gertrude’s voice was choked by the hectic cough, that went like an arrow to Trevylyan’s heart; and he felt that in her anxiety for

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CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH THE READER WILLLEARN HOW THE FAIRIES WERE RECEIVED BYTHE SOVEREIGNS OFTHE MINES. — THE COMPLAINT OFTHE LAST OF THE FAUNS. — THE RED HUNTSMAN. — THE STORM. —

DEATH.

In the deep valley of Ehrenthal, the metal kings — the Prince of the Silver Palaces, the Gnome Monarch of the dull Lead Mine, the President of the Copper United States — held a court to receive the fairy wanderers from the island of Nonnewerth.

The prince was there, in a gallant hunting-suit of oak leaves, in honour to England; and wore a profusion of fairy orders, which had been instituted from time to time, in honour of the human poets that had celebrated the spiritual and ethereal tribes. Chief of these, sweet Dreamer of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” was the badge crystallized from the dews that rose above the whispering reeds of Avon on the night of thy birth, — the great epoch of the intellectual world! Nor wert thou, O beloved Musaeus! nor thou, dim-dreaming Tieck!

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nor were ye, the wild imaginer of the bright-haired Undine, and the wayward spirit that invoked for the gloomy Manfred the Witch of the breathless Alps and the spirits of earth and air! — nor were ye without the honours of fairy homage! Your memory may fade from the heart of man, and the spells of new enchanters may succeed to the charm you once wove over the face of the common world; but still in the green knolls of the haunted valley and the deep shade of forests, and the starred palaces of air, ye are honoured by the beings of your dreams, as demigods and kings! Your graves are tended by invisible hands, and the places of your birth are hallowed by no perishable worship!

Even as I write,14 far away amidst the hills of Scotland, and by the forest thou hast clothed with immortal verdure, thou, the maker of “the Harp by lone Glenfillan’s spring,” art passing from the earth which thou hast “painted with delight.” And such are the chances of mortal fame, our children’s children may raise new idols on the site of thy holy altar, and cavil where their sires adored; but for thee the mermaid of the ocean shall wail in her coral caves, and the sprite that lives in the waterfalls shall mourn! Strange shapes shall hew thy monument in the recesses of the lonely rocks! ever by moonlight shall the fairies pause from their roundel when some wild note of their minstrelsy reminds them of thine own, — ceasing from their revelries, to weep for the silence of that mighty lyre, which breathed alike a revelation of the mysteries of spirits and of men!

14 It was just at the time the author was finishing this work that the great master of his art was drawing to the close of his career.

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The King of the Silver Mines sat in a cavern in the valley, through which the moonlight pierced its way and slept in shadow on the soil shining with metals wrought into unnumbered shapes; and below him, on a humbler throne, with a gray beard and downcast eye, sat the aged King of the Dwarfs that preside over the dull realms of lead, and inspire the verse of — -, and the prose of —! And there too a fantastic household elf was the President of the Copper Republic, — a spirit that loves economy and the Uses, and smiles sparely on the Beautiful. But, in the centre of the cave, upon beds of the softest mosses, the untrodden growth of ages, reclined the fairy visitors, Nymphalin seated by her betrothed. And round the walls of the cave were dwarf attendants on the sovereigns of the metals, of a thousand odd shapes and fantastic garments. On the abrupt ledges of the rocks the bats, charmed to stillness but not sleep, clustered thickly, watching the scene with fixed and amazed eyes; and one old gray owl, the favourite of the witch of the valley, sat blinking in a corner, listening with all her might that she might bring home the scandal to her mistress.

“And tell me, Prince of the Rhine-Island Fays,” said the King of the Silver Mines, “for thou art a traveller, and a fairy that hath seen much, how go men’s affairs in the upper world? As to ourself, we live here in a stupid splendour, and only hear the news of the day when our brother of lead pays a visit to the English printing-press, or the President of Copper goes to look at his improvements in steam-engines.”

“Indeed,” replied Fayzenheim, preparing to speak like AEneas in the Carthaginian court, — “indeed, your Majesty,

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I know not much that will interest you in the present aspect of mortal affairs, except that you are quite as much honoured at this day as when the Roman conqueror bent his knee to you among the mountains of Taunus; and a vast number of little round subjects of yours are constantly carried about by the rich, and pined after with hopeless adoration by the poor. But, begging your Majesty’s pardon, may I ask what has become of your cousin, the King of the Golden Mines? I know very well that he has no dominion in these valleys, and do not therefore wonder at his absence from your court this night; but I see so little of his subjects on earth that I should fear his empire was well nigh at an end, if I did not recognize everywhere the most servile homage paid to a power now become almost invisible.”

The King of the Silver Mines fetched a deep sigh. “Alas, prince,” said he, “too well do you divine the expiration of my cousin’s empire. So many of his subjects have from time to time gone forth to the world, pressed into military service and never returning, that his kingdom is nearly depopulated. And he lives far off in the distant parts of the earth, in a state of melancholy seclusion; the age of gold has passed, the age of paper has commenced.”

“Paper,” said Nymphalin, who was still somewhat of a precieuse, — “paper is a wonderful thing. What pretty books the human people write upon it!”

“Ah! that’s what I design to convey,” said the silver king. “It is the age less of paper money than paper government: the Press is the true bank.” The lord treasurer of the English fairies pricked up his ears at the word “bank;” for he was

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the Attwood of the fairies: he had a favourite plan of making money out of bulrushes, and had written four large bees’- wings full upon the true nature of capital.

While they were thus conversing, a sudden sound as of some rustic and rude music broke along the air, and closing its wild burden, they heard the following song: —

THE COMPLAINT OF THE LAST FAUN.

I.

The moon on the Latmos mountain Her pining vigil keeps; And ever the silver fountain In the Dorian valley weeps. But gone are Endymion’s dreams; And the crystal lymph Bewails the nymph

Whose beauty sleeked the streams!

II.

Round Arcady’s oak its green The Bromian ivy weaves;

But no more is the satyr seen Laughing out from the glossy leaves. Hushed is the Lycian lute, Still grows the seed

Of the Moenale reed, But the pipe of Pan is mute!

III.

The leaves in the noon-day quiver; The vines on the mountains wave;

And Tiber rolls his river As fresh by the Sylvan’s cave. But my brothers are dead and gone; And far away From their graves I stray,

And dream of the past alone!

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