“A virtuous well, about whose flow’ry banks
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds,
By the pale moonshine, dipping oftentimes
Their stolen children, so to make them free
From dying flesh, and dull mortality.”
Ariosto, in his “Orlando Furioso” (book xliii. stanza 98) says:
“I am a fayrie, and to make you know,
To be a fayrie what it doth import,
We cannot dye, how old so e’er we grow.
Of paines and harmes of ev’rie other sort
We taste, onelie no death we nature ow.”
An important feature of the fairy race was their power of vanishing at will, and of assuming various forms. In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” Oberon says:
“I am invisible,
And I will overhear their conference.”
Puck relates how he was in the habit of taking all kinds of outlandish forms; and in the “Tempest,” Shakespeare has bequeathed to us a graphic account of Ariel’s eccentricities. “Besides,” says Mr. Spalding,[23] “appearing in his natural shape, and dividing into flames, and behaving in such a manner as to cause young Ferdinand to leap into the sea, crying, ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!’ he assumes the forms of a water nymph (i. 2), a harpy (iii. 3), and also the Goddess Ceres (iv. 1), while the strange shapes, masquers, and even the hounds that hunt and worry the would-be king and viceroys of the island, are Ariel’s ‘meaner fellows.’” Poor Caliban complains of Prospero’s spirits (ii. 2):
“For every trifle are they set upon me;
Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me,
And after bite me: then like hedgehogs which
Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and mount
Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.”
That fairies are sometimes exceedingly diminutive is fully shown by Shakespeare, who gives several instances of this peculiarity. Thus Queen Mab, in “Romeo and Juliet,” to which passage we have already had occasion to allude (i. 4), is said to come
“In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman.”[24]
And Puck tells us, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), that when Oberon and Titania meet,