The Court of the King

“We wake with wrists and ankles jewelled still.”

There are many ways of entering fairyland; sometimes there is a door in the ground, and he who goes through finds himself in some great hall or carved and painted chamber. Sometimes we find the morning dew on a flower and touch the eyes with it; or, like John Dietrich, catch the cap which the fairies are flinging and put it on our own heads: and immediately the little people spring into sight, we hear the

 sweetness of their music and see the glitter of their hidden treasure and watch the merriness of their games.

The difficulty of the first method is to find the way, of the second to find the will; and John Dietrich’s way is the venture of confidence.

Children are continually in fairyland; grubbing in mother earth they find the door; as they tumble on the grass the morning dew touches their eyes and makes them pure.

But sometimes the light of fairyland will shine suddenly about you; and you know it is no common glow though it seems but the light of day to many. So a child sauntering and playing at midday in the fields may throw back its head and look into a


 deep blue summer sky, and be seized on a sudden by a beauty which troubles the spirit, a greatness which weighs upon the soul and wearies it, till the will fails. Or the light may shine softer at evening through the nursery window, when roofs of houses and branches of elder purple and darken against a sky all purest primrose, and draw the young spirit with a half-comprehended longing. Sometimes it comes with raptures of sunlight in a green garden; sometimes cold and strange in moonlight when existence holds its breath, and earth is lost in shadow or refined to vapour in uncertain light; sometimes with a fullness of peace in pale emerald of evening light jewelling the latticed windows


 of an old house, till the enchantment thickens and the spirit pants with the presage of the moment, waiting for a revelation which still delays.

And sometimes it is filled with the very spirit of the little people: curious, amused, fantastic—as when you walk on a sea-shore, and suddenly, as with the touch of a charm, the pool at your feet becomes a little inland sea: you see the rocky shores sloping down, the sandy bottom, the submarine promontories through the blue: forests of seaweed sway; a terrible creature with claws crawls out through pale coralline; a lump of red jelly stretches out its arms and becomes now a living, crimson flower, now a horrid polypus ravaging, irresistible; a fairy being

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 mailed in translucent armour floats on with antennæ fiercely waving; and you are back in fairyland.

Many times you may borrow the Red Cap to watch the boy Stevenson titanically carve mountains and seas in a mere mess of porridge; or to hear with Charles Kingsley when the grouse prophesies doom on the moor or the empty gnat boasts himself beside the stream. But sweetest of all it is to win for yourself the charm which opens your eyes in wood or field, and to hear with awakened ear the voices of created things.

These things should be at our command; but the things which children know we must re-learn; and there is no truth more evident to the child nor


 more surely proved to the philosopher than that all which we see or hear depends for all its meaning on the soul of the world that no man sees or hears. Let this book be taken as a short and simple lesson-book in hidden meanings. Life gives us many lessons hard to read, and problems painful to unriddle; but here in kind and simple wise our lesson was made plain and the page was pleasant to read: for to the eyes of everyday, in varying scenes, among diverse races, and nations long since dead “the dear old nurse” showed us the things which follow. She brought us through the Gates of Gold and sent us to float on the serene water below a pleasant pasture; she taught us daily, dwelling on the other side; led us


 by moonlight to the Court of the King; showed us through sordid circumstance the silent romance on the golden hill, as she had showed us romantic incidents, even in the Desert City; then she surrendered us to the guardianship of her child Imagination who, through the voices of others, brought back for us the Oriental vision of the royal boat in the mysterious midnight solemnity. And from this our older guardian led us back, and blotting out for us sight and sound of a populous city by a transparent veil, made us understand how to trust the mightiness of the life of which we were part.

Then she bade us close the book with the touch of pain and healing sent to quicken into life, and again


 Imagination sent us, among the scenes of daily life to look for the beautiful kingdom which endures: And we must say it in what form we may, so that we catch the meaning of the simple word, so early and so often said, from which our stubborn sense rebels, “the prison is the world of sight.”

Thus before memory should fade too much I wrote down some of the things I had under guidance witnessed and experienced, and those which the child Imagination had, as I say, taught in divers ways.

For too often we let memory lie like a rabbit in a winter burrow; and imagination buzzes on the surface of things like a fly on a pane: we narrow our vision to our purpose and our hearing


 to intelligible voices, till it needs a shock of strangeness or of beauty to bring us back to realities—to rouse memory to throw open the door in the hillside, to make imagination leave its sheet of glass for the world of air and light, to let the beauties and the music of the infinite creation reach the dull brain.

MARGARET BENSON