FAIRIES IN THE HIGHLANDS.
FROM THE “CULPRIT FAY.”
The moon looks down on old Cro’nest,
She mellows the shades on his shaggy breast,
And seems his huge gray form to throw
In a silver cone on the wave below;
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bough and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark,
Glimmers and dies the firefly’s spark—
Like starry twinkles that momently break
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest’s rack.
The stars are on the moving stream,
And fling, as its ripples gently flow,
A burnish’d length of wavy beam,
In an eel-like, spiral line below;
The winds are whist, and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid,
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket’s chirp, and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katydid;
And the plaint of the wailing whippowil,
Who moans unseen and ceaseless sings,
Ever a note of wail and woe,
Till morning spreads her rosy wings,
And earth and sky in her glances glow.
’Tis the hour of fairy ban and spell:
The wood-tick has kept the minutes well,
She has counted them all with click and stroke,
Deep in the heart of the mountain-oak,
And he has awaken’d the sentry elve,
Who sleeps with him in the haunted tree,
To bid him ring the hour of twelve,
And call the fays to their revelry.
Twelve small strokes on his tinkling bell
(’Twas made of the white snail’s pearly shell)—
“Midnight comes, and all is well!
Hither, hither, wing your way!
’Tis the dawn of the fairy day.”
They come from beds of lichen green,
They creep from the mullein’s velvet screen;
Some on the backs of beetles fly,
From the silver tops of moon-touched trees,
Where they swung in their cobweb-hammocks high,
And rock’d about in the evening breeze;
Some from the hum-bird’s downy nest—
They had driven him out by elfin power,
And, pillow’d on plumes of his rainbow breast,
Had slumber’d there till the charmed hour;
Some had lain in the scoop of the rock,
With glittering ising-stars inlaid;
And some had open’d the four-o’clock,
And stole within its purple shade,
And now they throng the moonlight glade.
Above—below—on every side,
Their little minim forms array’d
In the tricksy pomp of fairy pride!
Joseph Rodman Drake, 1795–1820.
