Vexed and disappointed, I flung myself along an old heap of logs which had escaped the demon of improvement, and were still in their old position, crumbling quietly and decently to dust. Here I lay until the sun clambered awkwardly down the western sky, and the shadows of evening came out from their hiding places to meet the bat and owl, and hold their nightly revels in the moonshine. Gradually I sunk into a new and pleasing state of existence. I had been reading “Undine,” a literary gem of so pure and perfect a form and structure, that the only wonder is how it should have been created by the mere spontaneous working of the imperfect human brain. It is now ten years since I read it—nor have I presumed to look into a modern “translation,” of which I have heard—and yet you shall see how well I remember it.
Undine is the favorite child of a water-goddess, and like all fairies with whom I was ever acquainted, holds her ethereal attributes only at the expense of her natural affections, and becomes mortal at the touch of man. Well—her mother being an exception of a fairy woman, has no small degree of _curiosity_ in her composition, and places this darling daughter of hers under the protection of an old anchorite who lived in a beautiful green island, all alone, as he thought; but he was mistaken, as you shall see: for this very island was the most frequent haunt of the fairies, gnomes, salamanders, and other such grave and respectable people—a sort of coffee-house, in fact, where they met nightly to talk over the politics of Elfinland, criticise the Queen’s last head-dress, laugh at Puck’s latest epigram, toss off their bumper of “mountain dew,” and stagger soberly to bed under the violet.
And so, in this wild, fragrant solitude—unknown to vulgar eyes and therefore unsoiled and untrampled upon—grew up this flower in all the luxuriant beauty of mortality, softened and spiritualized by her yet immortal nature. And, as the grape is most luscious and tempting the very moment ere it is tainted by the sun’s unhallowed kisses, and drops, a disgusting thing, from the green and immortal vine, so she grew ripe with loveliness and so intense in beauty, that, Narcissus like, she fell enamored of her own sweet image, as it was reflected in the pure spring sacred to the innate Ideal which bubbled within her own bosom. The old hermit marked anxiously and tenderly the growth of his young charge: and when, in the evening time—when the rose’s bosom swelled and panted beneath the night wind’s passionate embrace—she came and kissed his brow and nestled her beautiful curly head in his bosom, the old man was wild with joy, and his heart beat again as it did in youth, like the sleeping tide awakened to convulsions by the gentle moon.