The Court of the King and Other Studies

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 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.