“No wither’d witch shall here be seen,
No goblins lead their nightly crew;
The female fays shall haunt the green,
And dress the grave with pearly dew.”
This amiable quality is, likewise, thus beautifully alluded to by the
same poet:—
“By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung.”
Their employment is thus charmingly represented by Shakespeare, in the
address of Prospero:—
“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye, that on the sands, with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi–puppets, that
By moonshine do the green–sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew.”
In _The Midsummer Night’s Dream_, the queen, Titania, being desirous to
take a nap, says to her female attendants—
“Come, now a roundel, and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute hence;
Some to kill cankers in the musk–rosebuds;
Some, war with rear–mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats; and some keep back
The clamorous owl that nightly hoots, and wonders
At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep;
Then to your offices, and let me rest.”
Milton gives a most beautiful and accurate description of the little
green–coats of his native soil, than which nothing can be more happily
or justly expressed. He had certainly seen them, in this situation,
with “the poet’s eye”:—
“... Fairie elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon,
Sits arbitress, and neerer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they, on thir mirth and dance
Intent, with jocond music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”
The impression they made upon his imagination in early life appears
from his “Vacation Exercise,” at the age of nineteen:—
“Good luck befriend thee, son; for, at thy birth
The faiery ladies dannc’t upon the hearth;
The drowsie nurse hath sworn she did them spie
Come tripping to the room where thou didst lie,
And, sweetly singing round about thy bed,
Strew all their blessings on thy sleeping head.”
L’Abbé Bourdelon, in his _Ridiculous Extravagances of M. Ouflé_,
describes “The fairies of which,” he says, “grandmothers and nurses
tell so many tales to children. These fairies,” adds he, “I mean, who
are affirmed to be blind at home, and very clear–sighted abroad; who
dance in the moonshine when they have nothing else to do; who steal
shepherds and children, to carry them up to their caves,” etc.—(English
translation, p. 190.)
The fairies have already called themselves _spirits_, _ghosts_, or
_shadows_, and consequently they never died, a position, at the same
time, of which there is every kind of proof that a fact can require.
The reviser of Johnson and Steevens’s edition of _Shakespeare_, in
1785, makes a ridiculous reference to the allegories of Spenser, and a
palpably false one to Tickell’s _Kensington Gardens_, which he affirms
“will show that the opinion of fairies dying prevailed in the last
century,” whereas, in fact, it is found, on the slightest glance into
the poem, to maintain the direct reverse:—
“Meanwhile sad Kenna, loath to quit the grove,
Hung o’er the body of her breathless love,
Try’d every art (vain arts!) to change his doom,
And vow’d (vain vows!) to join him in the tomb.
What would she do? The Fates alike deny
The dead to live, or fairy forms to die.”
The fact is so positively proved, that no editor or commentator of
Shakespeare, present or future, will ever have the folly or impudence
to assert “that in Shakespeare’s time the notion of fairies dying was
generally known.”