I must tell you of an adventure I had last evening; it is history now, and I can hardly believe it could have really happened. It was not a dream, though it had all the sensations of a dream. I was wandering in pleasant thoughts apparently without end, when I found myself in an enchanted place: I cannot tell how I got there. Strange to say, I can now recall the incidents of it, but only when I repeat them.
Here are some of them. I was in a glade of an ethereal forest, where to every sense was tamed and tuned the most exquisite harmony. I heard the drops of water that fell from the trees as the dew fell at midday, and the groan of the boughs above, with their weight of jewels. The moon, that queen of admiration, floated above and surrounded by vividly brilliant colours, crimson, orange, gold, green, and every hue that tints the atmosphere. These combined produced sounds indescribably musical. Pure love penetrated my whole being. Was it in a glade or in the stars? I could not tell.
I played and sang, and my music was echoed softly by a thousand unseen voices. Sometimes, indeed, my singing woke the still air into remarkable life, when each note would playfully meet a buckling ripple, and every intonation would pause and turn, until it met a note which my lute or my voice had left behind. The incidents of this adventure were of rare darkness illuminated. “What a voice is this!” said one. “Was it a bird or one of the thousand echoes?” I was telling them of a region requiring neither sun nor stars to shine upon it, to make it beautiful as August noon-day, for it had no darkness, I was about to tell them of a gaudy hedgerow, descending in steps at least an octave, or of a sea-shell and its tremulous sounds, but did not find the music marine enough for my present theme. Surely I was but a conjurer, a musico-mathematician. Mdme. de St. Amour found something more in my art.
“You speak of a change in nature which filled you with perfect awe. Tell us about it. I felt the change; I breathed the cold wind among the tree-boughs, the waves falling against my last chord. And this was not here.” She was interrupted.
“No,” continued Metaphysica, “Nature never happening thus to change is not surely confined to the planet we inhabit with its erring moon, not one or many suns, dim or bright.”
“That is ideal news to me and comforts me much.” And so I went on playing and singing, until the elves and dryads danced and got tired of it, and no human beings, although some hundred, were not tired of it, but staggered, faint till death, with one and the same burden, unnoticeably incessantly dancing round me, but inside a railing of poplar-trees, an ornamented tie firmly blocking them from the excited light of my imagination. The charms of Hammock, or rather, Hammon, and of relays, would be required to describe one of the oft-heard motives which had spread a hundred sleeping pains round my guests, His Highness Prince Orsino.
Even that grand old king of the press directly below Grand Monarch (who, while asleep, was amusing himself reading the following anecdote about Prince Orsino in Spanish as a monthly publication), was paying a respectful visit to Sphinx, and furnished me afterwards with enough notes taken in short-hand to monopolize nearly a whole New Series. He implored me earnestly not to let the Court of Denmark know anything about this. Cementatif made a grand bow on hearing my name mentioned, of thanks for having refuted some treatises then recently put forth by some hyper-ideists who had really no faith whatever in Nature. The sceptical French bishops would scarcely believe a monk who told them that in the Polish Vnukci an ass lay down at two o’clock one day and died at the hour the sign of the zodiac he belonged to represented Venus, the passing to the father-poet, Hollerium.
My voice led them to a state of thrilling happiness, while my odes disposed them to recollections difficult to comprehend. Old Rip Van Winkle was gradually losing sight of that dumb niece he has off and on at so much per month, he having very little to say to her. Old Herr von Kreutzburg was nearly drowned in that sea of grand visions. Still was perceived the necessity for excitement while the excitement remained. My lute was thrown down in disgust. I moved away. Nevertheless, I still could hear my voice involved in dreamy bleeding cases, while I, crumpling up all around inside the green railing, was now, gently borne down almighty rivers. Then I fully resigned myself, as rapidly as Time ran on, whilst a soldier’s canoe, in which were a wild man with hair as long as a fishbone, was murmuring words variously sounding, in honour of a wild woman with hair convenience-h olding a scimitar, a tar-and-feathered man, the Kiss-fire himself, and some moonstone Indians, was swinging giddily from side to side, my mahogany Phantom-boat, with gilded eaves, by some hail-courted branches, whose long arms had been grandly wrought for a grand purpose by specks of moons approaching each other, whilst the sound of my voice grew ever more and more irregular.