After life's departing sigh,
To the spots I loved most dearly,
In the sunshine and the shadow,
By the fountain welling clearly,
Through the wood and o'er the meadow,
Flit I like a butterfly.
There a gentle pair I spy.
Round the maiden's tresses flying,
From her chaplet I discover
All that I had lost in dying,
Still with her and with her lover.
Who so happy then as I?
For she smiles with laughing eye;
And his lips to hers he presses,
Vows of passion interchanging,
Stifling her with sweet caresses,
O'er her budding beauties ranging;
And around the twain I fly.
And she sees me fluttering nigh;
And beneath his ardour trembling,
Starts she up--then off I hover.
"Look there, dearest!" Thus dissembling,
Speaks the maiden to her lover--
"Come and catch that butterfly!"
* * * * *
In the days of his boyhood, and of Monk Lewis, Sir Walter Scott
translated the Erl King, and since then it has been a kind of
assay-piece for aspiring German students to thump and hammer at will.
We have heard it sung so often at the piano by soft-voiced maidens,
and hirsute musicians, before whose roaring the bull of Phalaris
might be dumb, that we have been accustomed to associate it with
stiff white cravats, green tea, and a superabundance of lemonade. But
to do full justice to its unearthly fascination, one ought to hear it
chanted by night in a lonely glade of the Schwartzwald or Spessart
forest, with the wind moaning as an accompaniment, and the ghostly
shadows of the branches flitting in the moonlight across the path.