“I am the last lingering wanderer of the race which the Romans worshipped; hither I followed their victorious steps, and in these green hollows have I remained. Sometimes in the still noon, when the leaves of spring bud upon the whispering woods, I peer forth from my rocky lair, and startle the peasant with my strange voice and stranger shape. Then goes he home, and puzzles his thick brain with mopes and fancies, till at length he imagines me, the creature of the South! one of his northern demons, and his poets adapt the apparition to their barbarous lines.” “Ho!” quoth the silver king, “surely thou art the origin of the fabled Satan of the cowled men living whilom in yonder ruins, with its horns and goatish limbs; and the harmless faun has been made the figuration of the most implacable of fiends. But why, O wanderer of the South, lingerest thou in these foreign dells? Why returnest thou not to the bi-forked hill-top of old Parnassus, or the wastes around the yellow course of the Tiber?” “My brethren are no more,” said the poor faun; “and the very faith that left us sacred and unharmed is departed. But here all the spirits not of mortality are still honoured; and I wander, mourning for Silenus, though amidst the vines that should console me for his loss.” “Thou hast known great beings in thy day,” said the leaden king, who loved the philosophy of a truism (and the history of whose inspirations I shall one day write). “Ah, yes,” said the faun; “my birth was amidst the freshness of the world, when the flush of the universal life coloured all things with divinity; when not a tree but had its Dryad, not a fountain that was without its Nymph. I sat by the gray throne of Saturn, in his old age, ere yet he was discrowned (for he was no visionary ideal, but the arch monarch of the pastoral age), and heard from his lips the history of the world’s birth. But those times are gone forever,--they have left harsh successors.” “It is the age of paper,” muttered the lord treasurer, shaking his head. “What ho, for a dance!” cried Fayzenheim, too royal for moralities, and he whirled the beautiful Nymphalin into a waltz. Then forth issued the fairies, and out went the dwarfs. And the faun leaning against an aged elm, ere yet the midnight waned, the elves danced their charmed round to the antique minstrelsy of his pipe,--the minstrelsy of the Grecian world! “Hast thou seen yet, my Nymphalin,” said Fayzenheim, in the pauses of the dance, “the recess of the Hartz, and the red form of its mighty hunter?” “It is a fearful sight,” answered Nymphalin; “but with thee I should not fear.” “Away then!” cried Fayzenheim; “let us away at the first cock-crow, into those shaggy dells; for there is no need of night to conceal us, and the unwitnessed blush of morn or the dreary silence of noon is, no less than the moon’s reign, the season for the sports of the superhuman tribes.”