Look again at his “Castle in Spain,” how it is perched up above that might of forest, like a child that has climbed whence it can never descend. And the little house at the edge of the high, dark wood--in “The Farm under the Hill”--is as frail and timid as if it heard the roaring of wild beasts, and the little white road winds into the darkness as to death. So, too, with the children who make a pretence of playing hoops at the edge of just such another wood, though mortal has never come out of it since the beginning of the world. The ship in the “Fall of the Leaf” is subdued to the spirit of autumn as is the poet subdued to the immense scenes of “Alastor.” To introduce an elvish figure, as he has done, in “Will o’ the Wisp” was an unnecessary aid to the elvishness of the scene itself. Indeed, his human or fantastic figures seem to be sometimes as much out of place as a Yankee at the court of King Arthur, though there are two notable exceptions--“The Sower” and “The Weed Burner”--both figures towards which idolatry might be excusable, so nobly do they represent labour in the field. And even in “The Weed Burner” the boy seems bemused by the motion and savour of the smoke that curdles up through the autumn air. The picture of a forest pool is magical, but it repudiates the fairy altogether. Nothing would be more out of place here than the kind of sucking harlequin or columbine which is commonly foisted upon us as a fairy; for here is something more desirable, the very forces which begot the fairies upon a different age from ours. Even when he draws a house it is, I think, for the house’s sake, for the sake of whatever soul it has acquired, which men cannot take away. Was there ever such an inn as “The Wispers”? The landlord is dead, the casks are dry, a rat has littered on the top stair of the cellar, and the landlord says-- “’Tis late and cold, stir up the fire: Sit close, and draw the table nigher; Be merry, and drink wine that’s old, A hearty medicine ’gainst a cold: Your beds of wanton down the best, Where you shall tumble to your rest; I could wish you wenches too, But I am dead, and cannot do. Call for the best the house may ring, Sack, white, and claret let them bring, And drink apace, while breath you have; You’ll find but cold drink in the grave: Plover, partridge, for your dinner, And a capon for the sinner, You shall find ready when you’re up, And your horse shall have his sup: Welcome, welcome, shall fly round, And I shall smile, though underground.” I like the inn, but the spider loves it, and his webs bar the door against all but ghostly travellers. The barn, again, with its doorway opening upon the summer night, has a life of its own. The two figures at the door are utterly dwarfed by its ancientness, its space, and the infinite silence without.