Still, being hungry, I chose the kitchen door, and by a friendly domestic was smuggled away to bed--with a stomach full of pleasant dreams.
Such was my first meeting with Once-Upon-a-Time.
Next time I met her my boyhood was gone by, and my fancy was no longer occupied with the nursery-stories of which the Blue-Bird had sung. Giants and dragons were receding from my imagination, and my fancy, I must confess, was beginning to take a more sentimental turn. The wood still remained my wonderland, but the wonders I sought there were of a different, if scarcely less dangerous, character. By this I had exchanged my nursery-books for the Mort D’Arthur and Spenser and Shakespeare and such like romantic literature; and my head was, therefore, full of the beautiful ladies and noble lovers of old time. I fear there is no denying that I had by this become quite bookish, and you could scarcely have encountered me in the wood or elsewhere, without some poet or some old playbook under my arm. Ah, how happy were those long summer mornings when I would lie upon a green bank, absorbed in some honeyed tale of lovers dead and gone, with the green boughs above sunnily silhouetted on the page. And, just as when a boy the wood had been the scene of all my old nursery-stories, so still it served me as the stage for all my romantic heroes and heroines. It was by turns every wood mentioned in my poets. Of course, it was, first and foremost the Forest of Arden; and one particular glade presided over by a giant oak was easily identified by me as the green courtroom of the banished Duke. As for Jacques, I felt myself his very brother, and replenished the woodland streams with sentimental tears, with no less enjoyment of my own melancholy than he. Rosalind, of course, I was expecting to meet with every moment, and did not fail to inscribe the tree-trunks with sundry rhymes which I hoped might catch her eye. Of these I may have a story to tell later. When the wood was in darker moods, when it wore its tragic mask of thunder and lightning, or put on some sinister witchery of twilight, I would say that Macbeth was on his way to meet the weird sisters. Sometimes, it was “a wood near Athens,” or at others, remembering my Keats, it was that “forest on the shores of Crete,” where Lycius met the snake-woman Lamia. The wood, indeed, was filled with memories of Keats, and if any one in the world knew where the lover of Isabella had been buried by her murderous brothers, surely it was I. I too had discovered the hollow oak where Merlin lay entranced; and many a night, hidden behind the bole of some gigantic beech, had watched Selene bend in a bright crescent above her sleeping shepherd lad.