It was then that the elfin King moved his hand again, where he held it
high by the crystal spires of his crown, and waved a way through the
walls of his magical palace, and showed to Lirazel the unmeasured
leagues of his kingdom. And she saw by magic, for so long as his fingers
made that spell; the dark green forests and all the fells of Elfland,
and the solemn pale-blue mountains and the valleys that weird folk
guarded, and all the creatures of fable that crept in the dark of huge
leaves, and the riotous trolls as they scampered away towards Earth: she
saw the watchers lift their horns to their lips, while there flashed a
light on the horns that was the proudest triumph of the hidden art of
her father, the light of a dawn lured over unthinkable spaces to appease
his daughter and comfort her whims and recall her fancies from Earth.
She saw the lawns whereon Time had idled for centuries, withering not
one bloom of all the boundary of flowers; and the new light coming upon
the lawns she loved, through the heavy colour of Elfland, gave them a
beauty that they had never known until dawn made this boundless journey
to meet the enchanted twilight; and all the while there glowed and
flashed and glittered those palace spires of which only song may tell.
From that bewildering beauty he turned his eyes away, and looked in his
daughter's face to see the wonder with which she would welcome her
glorious home as her fancies came back from the fields of age and death,
whither--alas--they had wandered. And though her eyes were turned to the
Elfin Mountains, whose mystery and whose blue they strangely matched,
yet as the Elf King looked in those eyes for which alone he had lured
the dawn so far from its natural courses, he saw in their magical deeps
a thought of Earth! A thought of Earth, though he had lifted his arm and
made a mystical sign with all his might to bring a wonder to Elfland
that should content her with home. And all his dominions had exulted in
this, and the watchers on awful crags had blown strange calls, and
monster and insect and bird and flower had rejoiced with a new joy, and
there in the centre of Elfland his daughter thought of Earth.
Had he shown her any wonder but dawn he might have lured home that
fancy, but in bringing this exotic beauty to Elfland to blend with its
ancient wonders, he awoke memories of morning coming over fields that he
knew not, and Lirazel played in fancy in fields once more with Orion,
where grew the unenchanted earthly flowers amongst the English grasses.
"Is it not enough?" he said in his strange rich magical voice, and
pointed across his wide lands with the fingers that summoned wonder.
She sighed: it was not enough.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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