Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and WomenMacDonald, George
Science
Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
MacDonald, George
Fantasy fiction
They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men,
are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the
heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an
external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be
without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of
all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of
the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is
already imbodied. The blank, which is only a forgotten life, lying
behind the consciousness, and the misty splendour, which is an
undeveloped life, lying before it, may be full of mysterious
revelations of other connexions with the worlds around us, than those
of science and poetry. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and
green glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the
hidden things of a man’s soul, and, it may be, with the secret history
of his body as well. They are portions of the living house wherein he
abides.
Through the realms of the monarch Sun
Creeps a world, whose course had begun,
On a weary path with a weary pace,
Before the Earth sprang forth on her race:
But many a time the Earth had sped
Around the path she still must tread,
Ere the elder planet, on leaden wing,
Once circled the court of the planet’s king.
There, in that lonely and distant star,
The seasons are not as our seasons are;
But many a year hath Autumn to dress
The trees in their matron loveliness;
As long hath old Winter in triumph to go
O’er beauties dead in his vaults below;
And many a year the Spring doth wear
Combing the icicles from her hair;
And Summer, dear Summer, hath years of June,
With large white clouds, and cool showers at noon:
And a beauty that grows to a weight like grief,
Till a burst of tears is the heart’s relief.
Children, born when Winter is king,
May never rejoice in the hoping Spring;
Though their own heart-buds are bursting with joy,
And the child hath grown to the girl or boy;
But may die with cold and icy hours
Watching them ever in place of flowers.
And some who awake from their primal sleep,
When the sighs of Summer through forests creep,
Live, and love, and are loved again;
Seek for pleasure, and find its pain;
Sink to their last, their forsaken sleeping,
With the same sweet odours around them creeping.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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