“‘I will marry her,’ said the knight,
‘And bear her with me away.’
‘Tell me where wilt thou take her,
Thou strange and unknown man.
I do not refuse her to thee,
But whither wilt thou roam?’
“He married fair Amelia,
And carried her far away.
“Where is the house thou dwell’st in?
And say where is thy home?’
“He took her to a cabin,
All leaves and sticks and hay,
‘My true name is Ortello.
To-night, at the hour of midnight,
I will carry thee away.
“‘I will bear thee to the graveyard
To dig up the newly dead;
Then if thou hast thirst or hunger
Thou mayst suck the blood of the corpses,’
To her the Sorcerer said.
“She wept in desperate sorrow,
She wrung her lily hand,
But she was lost for ever,
And in the witches’ band.”
This was, and is, a very rude ballad; its moral appears to be that feminine caprice and disregard of parental love must be punished. It is very remarkable as having to perfection that Northern or German element which Goethe detected in a Neapolitan witch-song given in his Italian journey. [224] It has also in spirit, and somewhat strangely in form, that which characterises one of Heine’s most singular songs. It impresses me, as I was only yesterday impressed in the Duomo of Siena at finding, among the wood-carvings in the choir, Lombard grotesques which were markedly Teutonic, having in them no trace of anything Italian.
“Quaint mysteries of goblins and strange things,
We scarce know what—half animal half vine,
And beauteous face upon a toad, from which
Outshoots a serpent’s tail—the Manicore,
A mixture grim of all things odd and wild,
The fairy-witch-like song of German eld.”
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE
“Wherever beauty dwells,
In gulf or aerie mountains or deep dells,
Thou pointest out the way, and straight ’tis won,
Thou leddest Orpheus through the gleams of death.”—Keats.
“Silvestres homines sacer interpres que Deorum
Cædibus et victu deterruit Orpheus.
Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres, rabidosque Leones.”—Horace.
It may have happened to the reader, in his travels, to trace in some majestic mountain-land, amid rocky ravines, that which was, perhaps, in prehistoric times a terrible torrent or a roaring river. I mean, indeed, such a furious flood as is now unknown on earth, one which tore away the highest hills like trifles, melting them in a minute to broad alluvials, and ground up the grandest granite cliffs to gravel-dust, even as a mighty mill grates grain to flour.