"You help him!"
Märchen laughed.
"Go your ways and leave him to me; I will manage him. I know all. You are once more weary of the world and want to die, and have no talent, and men are all bad, very wicked indeed, and faithless, and have deserted you, and do not believe in you. Oh, you poor, poor human soul! Why do you not become a butterfly and sleep on a flower? He knows that he has wings, and that his flower has scent, and that his meadow is quite full of blossoms. What does he care whether the others see it since he sees it! And now look here; I have come back, although you scarcely deserve it, you doubter. Look at this heavy laden distaff, that is for you, only for you, if you will listen to me."
And Märchen began to spin and sing and narrate all night long, and her friend wrote and wrote, without knowing that his pencil moved; he thought he had only heard and listened. He wrote down thoughts and songs and poems; they streamed like living fire from under his hand. And what he wrote moved the world. Men thought his thoughts after him, and sang his songs, and wept over his stories, and knew not that the poet who had given them all these things was sad unto death, misunderstood of all, and that Sorrow visited him far oftener than Märchen.
They called him a child of the gods and a genius, and knew not that he was a man for whose soul Sorrow and Märchen struggled ceaselessly, and who had suffered so much grief and seen so many wonders that his strength was broken. Ay, the children of the gods must suffer much on earth, and Märchen only visits those that have been proved, and ever departs from them if they have made themselves unworthy of her. Once she told at parting the tale which follows:—
Footnotes
[2] I have been forced to keep the German word, as no English one covers that peculiar type of German fanciful stories that are known under this appellation. Märchen are something more than fairy tales; something deeper, wider, richer, and more varied. The queen calls the present book a cycle of Märchen.— Translator.