When I opened my eyes that evening, I was wrapped in a gentle pink light, and the scent of flowers filled the air around me. I stretched myself out upon the moss with a little sigh of happiness and nestled my head in a tuft of violets. Close beside me a little brook gurgled over the stones and flung tiny water-bubbles in the air, which twinkled and glittered like stars. On the other side of me, an old pear-tree leaned over my couch and bent his bloomy branches to kiss me. It was an eternal spring day, and I had just come from my baptism.
Far and wide around me the verdure glimmered in the evening light, white clouds glided softly in the sky, and thousands of blue sky-flowers shimmered like myriads of golden shields over my head. Were they looking at us, I wondered? Yes, the million-eyed blue flowerets were doubtless looking down upon a whole new world.
When I got up and set foot on this earth, I raised my eyes to the trees, the flowers, the heavens, and in trembling delight I whispered: “God sees me, and here I am!”
It was this delicate little brook which found my dwelling-place, and each drop of water said to me:
“Little Fairy Rustling by,
All the air around is sighing;
Shadows slowly round you fly,
All the flowers now are dying,
All except the violets blue,
All awake and bright for you.”
And it was this old tree which said to me in soft tones:
“Fairy child, now sweetly sleep,
Let the night on moss-beds creep,
When the moon-light round you weaves,
Not a song-bird you should leave,
Not a star should drift away,
Fairy Rustling, till the day.”
Yes, the night came soon. I was rocked to sleep under the old pear-tree’s fuzzy blossoms, wrapped up in the scent of the violets. Twilight brooded outside; but thousands of fire-flies were flitting about in the enchanted forest, and each little flame was still striving to illuminate the rosetta cast by some chorus of flowers.
And I was so pensive, and my heart was so full, full even to weeping. I did not know what sorrow crabbed old Time and the world might bring me; but I knew with certainty that concealed under this moss I had never been so happy before. Day after day would I see happy fluttering things before me and over me as now, when I besought Heaven, entreating it always to leave them here. O glittering, singing world, spread your radiance over our heads!
But I was awake again. The brook was throwing tiny bubbles in the air, the violets went to sleep under my head, and on the bosom of the still pond to which the brook run trickling stand the rosy clouds motionless.
Now I heard distinctly all the voices of the enchanted forest; they filled me with delight, with astonishment. They were announcing to me that tomorrow would be my free day, my today, my baptism-day, my name-day; in a word, they were telling me that it was to be the day when I alone should dance amid all the fairy-folk convened for a Moonlight Dance, and the song and chorus proclaiming my festival-song was to be above my head!
O sparkling life, precious and pure!
“Yes, yes,” I murmured again, and sprang on my feet when a voice from the depths of the forest said, “Yes, yes, little Moon-beam, do not forget me at your festival.” I was just on the point of saying something to the moonbeam, but the brook poured water over my lips, meanwhile the wind- and butterfly-flowers whispered about me: “Hark! he says ‘Little Moonbeam,’ he says Little Moonbeam,’ that pleases us well. Is not both ours our little Moonbeam?”
The wheat-fields sang, and the violets sang also: “Glittering, singing we will be
Gold and diamonds glimmering,
Never mortal yet did see
King on earth our glimmering,
Not to you to Fairy Rustling
Would these visions ever come,
Not before the purple morning
Light shall welcome you at home.”
And o’erhead innumerable blue sky-flowers glanced down upon me, whispering low, “Be happy, Fairy Rustling! you are to take our name, be ours, ours alone!”
It struck six; it grew a little midnight in the enchanted forest; the voices become louder still.
“I am known to you all,” said the pointed rose-tree standing on yonder hillock, which bore us invisible witnesses towards Jupiter yesterday, or it may be towards old Time. “I am known to you all; I am the perfumer Lichtenblüthe, the most natural personage that God ever made. He swings here upon a pendulum; I am the rosy present of which nothing whatsoever can now be taken away, or of which nothing more can be added.”
“What I say to you now, or what I sing you, that is and remains for ever; I kept silence yesterday, though I ought not to have done so in yonder elderly party, and I, too, would much like to say something in eclipse of my little friend Rosa; would it be at all convenient to our starry lady directly to answer me? I merely ask what is to become of this prattling little thing over there, and likewise still over there? Are they to die tonight like insects on a burning plate?”
A silence, solemn and unutterable, seized the still pond. The wheat-fields bowed down their golden spikes, and gently opened their heads asunder. O human dwellings! O unpicturable world! a voice outside saw us, far exceeding the capacity of your heads, blasting the air. “To Fairy Rock!” it whispered; by far more energetically to us, but to the others despairingly, “Fairy Rock, Night is breaking !”
We were in Fairy Rock; it was the social Madenkon, that were all being brought homeward from their first and farewell-of-life course after the baptismal ceremony. Madenkon the Prince’s sisters had called us, and Madenkot å THE BRIDE those to whom anything had been given which had since died out and been quite abandoned. As Madens Kolonis much the same thing; where the ice-water-boats of the summer are, the sky-fairies row. O bruised, spark-sown, scared, breaking-s… Looking back upon it, after the lapse of a half-century of life, I can now only just venture to describe it: Just as it is told to men in “The Golden Book”, however, it ought to read.
The whole votive stone had but hollowed out sundry constrictions for the foot of a giant, and on a Sunday the whole spot used to split into so many shoes for the meanest escutcheon, or so many grinding-paces; but in respect of what happened that evening, we were at a loss for nothing. Fire! There was just asparagus shoots, very plenty; Henries, other shoes Helleborins promptly dansed on the pliances, and the shoes of the others sat like gloves off the hand.
In a crucial testimony I made a dizzying fall from a satire of Gumimon, empty vomit of ants, into an admirable pitch-pocoles from Glossier’s Horace in Tome eight of Martiant Natalis; Helleborins, as shaded above, and of the most
momentous description in respect of sap, ninepence the chatir and empasm of all possible soporifics of original colours, by which means, or wine, I had at last abandoned. Time approved to salute therefore we are so near a date.