What a charm is here! Millions of colors that never were in the rainbow nor the sea-shell; a subtle, exquisite loveliness--which yet, in the after-taste--somehow repels. Always mystery; what we call inanimate things waking to life (as they should do, indeed, in any right-minded fairy-tale); a sense of mutable, inconsequent horizons, over which no sun has ever risen or set. And, as there should be in fairy-tales, a kind of esotericism glimmering through; a meaning concealed yet obvious. Yet there is fairy gold and fairy gold. The best kind has the aspect of a petal or a pebble; but with the dawn, lo, some diamond or magical tiara. We are a little doubtful that this moon-wan opalescence will not turn out to be only a good worthy piece of Birmingham-ware. Withal, there are fine notes at the end, that touch deep centers in us; for these one can but be duly and truly thankful. There are certainly two methods of imagination; and we find them shown forth excellently in fairy literature. By that we mean all mythology; every tale wherein non-human or magical agents play their part. It will include a good part of our poetry; Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Poe, and Tennyson all dipped into it at times, or moved habitually among its haunted valleys. There are two roads running out from our actual world, and they run through two separate Fairy-Lands. You shall go out by your front door when the sun is shining, and come upon the one of them. It leads through a wood of daffodils--Wordsworth's and Shakespeare's daffodils--in whose company you will find yourself strangely exultant: these are they that "take the winds with beauty"; hence their jocundity and infectious mirth. Alive? Why, certainly; and wise also--only perhaps you shall not yet be allowed to pry too curiously into their counsels. All the flowers are alive in this fairyland; and they all have their own secrets, which are sunbright and beneficent. Sunbright, or sundark like the hyacinth--but still beneficent: poppy and mandragora are not allowed to grow here. As you ride on, you shall still feel the shining of the sun and the vigor of the wind; or perhaps there will be sweet intimate grayness of clouds, or perhaps the sweetness of rain. Rain or wind, you will feel the touch of either on your face, and smell the earth-scent. There is one valley there, where the sky is always clouded and windy; the sedge is withered on the lake there, and no birds sing. But for that, you might mistake it at first for a place in the other fairyland, because of the haggard and woe-begone knight-at-arms you are to meet with, "alone and palely loitering." Keats came to this valley, and heard his whole story from him: it was this knight-at-arms who met _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_.