Capítulo 13 de 23

THE ISLAND OF THE FAY

Nullus enim locus sine genio est.—Servius.

“La musique,” says Marmontel, in those “Contes Moraux” (*1) which

in all our translations, we have insisted upon calling “Moral

Tales,” as if in mockery of their spirit—“la musique est le seul

des talents qui jouissent de lui-même; tous les autres veulent

des temoins.” He here confounds the pleasure derivable from sweet

sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more than any

other talent, is that for music susceptible of complete

enjoyment, where there is no second party to appreciate its

exercise. And it is only in common with other talents that it

produces effects which may be fully enjoyed in solitude. The idea

which the raconteur has either failed to entertain clearly, or

has sacrificed in its expression to his national love of point,

is, doubtless, the very tenable one that the higher order of

music is the most thoroughly estimated when we are exclusively

alone. The proposition, in this form, will be admitted at once by

those who love the lyre for its own sake, and for its spiritual

uses. But there is one pleasure still within the reach of fallen

mortality and perhaps only one—which owes even more than does

music to the accessory sentiment of seclusion. I mean the

happiness experienced in the contemplation of natural scenery. In

truth, the man who would behold aright the glory of God upon

earth must in solitude behold that glory. To me, at least, the

presence—not of human life only, but of life in any other form

than that of the green things which grow upon the soil and are

voiceless—is a stain upon the landscape—is at war with the genius

of the scene. I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the

gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests

that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains

that look down upon all,—I love to regard these as themselves but

the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole—a

whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and

most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets;

whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the

sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of a God;

whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in

immensity, whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own

cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain—a being

which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material

much in the same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us.

Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on

every hand—notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the

priesthood—that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important

consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which

the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without

collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms

of those bodies are accurately such as, within a given surface,

to include the greatest possible amount of matter;—while the

surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate a denser

population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces

otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an

object with God, that space itself is infinite; for there may be

an infinity of matter to fill it. And since we see clearly that

the endowment of matter with vitality is a principle—indeed, as

far as our judgments extend, the leading principle in the

operations of Deity,—it is scarcely logical to imagine it

confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace it,

and not extending to those of the august. As we find cycle within

cycle without end,—yet all revolving around one far-distant

centre which is the God-head, may we not analogically suppose in

the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater,

and all within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are madly erring,

through self-esteem, in believing man, in either his temporal or

future destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that

vast “clod of the valley” which he tills and contemns, and to

which he denies a soul for no more profound reason than that he

does not behold it in operation. (*2)

These fancies, and such as these, have always given to my

meditations among the mountains and the forests, by the rivers

and the ocean, a tinge of what the everyday world would not fail

to term fantastic. My wanderings amid such scenes have been many,

and far-searching, and often solitary; and the interest with

which I have strayed through many a dim, deep valley, or gazed

into the reflected Heaven of many a bright lake, has been an

interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have strayed and

gazed alone. What flippant Frenchman was it who said in allusion

to the well-known work of Zimmerman, that, “la solitude est une

belle chose; mais il faut quelqu’un pour vous dire que la

solitude est une belle chose?” The epigram cannot be gainsayed;

but the necessity is a thing that does not exist.

It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant

region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and

melancholy tarn writhing or sleeping within all—that I chanced

upon a certain rivulet and island. I came upon them suddenly in

the leafy June, and threw myself upon the turf, beneath the

branches of an unknown odorous shrub, that I might doze as I

contemplated the scene. I felt that thus only should I look upon

it—such was the character of phantasm which it wore.

On all sides—save to the west, where the sun was about

sinking—arose the verdant walls of the forest. The little river

which turned sharply in its course, and was thus immediately lost

to sight, seemed to have no exit from its prison, but to be

absorbed by the deep green foliage of the trees to the east—while

in the opposite quarter (so it appeared to me as I lay at length

and glanced upward) there poured down noiselessly and

continuously into the valley, a rich golden and crimson waterfall

from the sunset fountains of the sky.

About midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took in,

one small circular island, profusely verdured, reposed upon the

bosom of the stream.

So blended bank and shadow there

That each seemed pendulous in air—

so mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely

possible to say at what point upon the slope of the emerald turf

its crystal dominion began.

My position enabled me to include in a single view both the

eastern and western extremities of the islet; and I observed a

singularly-marked difference in their aspects. The latter was all

one radiant harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed

beneath the eyes of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with

flowers. The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and

asphodel-interspersed. The trees were lithe, mirthful,

erect—bright, slender, and graceful,—of Eastern figure and

foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There

seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no

airs blew from out the heavens, yet every thing had motion

through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable

butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.

(*4)

The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest

shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded

all things. The trees were dark in color, and mournful in form

and attitude, wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral

shapes that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death.

The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its

blades hung droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many

small unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that

had the aspect of graves, but were not; although over and all

about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The shade of the

trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itself

therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I

fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower,

separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and

thus became absorbed by the stream; while other shadows issued

momently from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors

thus entombed.

This idea, having once seized upon my fancy, greatly excited it,

and I lost myself forthwith in revery. “If ever island were

enchanted,” said I to myself, “this is it. This is the haunt of

the few gentle Fays who remain from the wreck of the race. Are

these green tombs theirs?—or do they yield up their sweet lives

as mankind yield up their own? In dying, do they not rather waste

away mournfully, rendering unto God, little by little, their

existence, as these trees render up shadow after shadow,

exhausting their substance unto dissolution? What the wasting

tree is to the water that imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker

by what it preys upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the

death which engulfs it?”

As I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank rapidly

to rest, and eddying currents careered round and round the

island, bearing upon their bosom large, dazzling, white flakes of

the bark of the sycamore—flakes which, in their multiform

positions upon the water, a quick imagination might have

converted into anything it pleased—while I thus mused, it

appeared to me that the form of one of those very Fays about whom

I had been pondering made its way slowly into the darkness from

out the light at the western end of the island. She stood erect

in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom

of an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams,

her attitude seemed indicative of joy—but sorrow deformed it as

she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at

length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light. “The

revolution which has just been made by the Fay,” continued I,

musingly, “is the cycle of the brief year of her life. She has

floated through her winter and through her summer. She is a year

nearer unto Death; for I did not fail to see that, as she came

into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in

the dark water, making its blackness more black.”

And again the boat appeared and the Fay; but about the attitude

of the latter there was more of care and uncertainty and less of

elastic joy. She floated again from out the light and into the

gloom (which deepened momently) and again her shadow fell from

her into the ebony water, and became absorbed into its blackness.

And again and again she made the circuit of the island, (while

the sun rushed down to his slumbers), and at each issuing into

the light there was more sorrow about her person, while it grew

feebler and far fainter and more indistinct, and at each passage

into the gloom there fell from her a darker shade, which became

whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length when the sun had

utterly departed, the Fay, now the mere ghost of her former self,

went disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony

flood—and that she issued thence at all I cannot say, for

darkness fell over all things and I beheld her magical figure no

more.