Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing!...
S. T. Coleridge
[133]. "For Fear of Little Men."
"Terrestrial devils," says Robert Burton, "are those Lares, Genii, Fauns, Satyrs, Wood-nymphs, Foliots, Fairies, Robin Goodfellows, Trulli, etc., which as they are most conversant with men, so they do them most harm.... These are they that dance on heaths and greens ... and leave that green circle, which we commonly find in plain fields, which others hold to proceed from a meteor falling, or some accidental rankness of the ground, so nature sports herself; they are sometimes seen by old women and children.... Paracelsus reckons up many places in Germany, where they do usually walk in little coats, some two feet long. A bigger kind there is of them called with us hobgoblins, and Robin Goodfellows, that would in those superstitious times grind corn for a mess of milk, cut wood, or do any manner of drudgery work. They would mend old irons in those Aeolian isles of Lipari, in former ages, and have been often seen and heard.... Dithmarus Bleskenius, in his description of Iceland, reports for a certainty, that almost in every family they have yet some such familiar spirits.... Another sort of these there are, which frequent forlorn houses.... They will make strange noises in the night, howl sometimes pitifully, and then laugh again, cause great flame and sudden lights, fling stones, rattle chains, shave men, open doors and shut them, fling down platters, stools, chests, sometimes appear in the likeness of hares, crows, black dogs, etc." ...
[135].
So too with Hazel Dorn, in the following poem by Mr. Bernard Sleigh, who has most kindly allowed me to print it here for the first time.