Phantastes, A Faerie Romance | Page 4

ist die Natur so rein poetisch
wle die Stube eines Zauberers, eines Physikers, eine Kinderstube elne
Polterund Vorrathskammer
"Ein Mahrchen ist wie ein Traumbild ohne Zusammenhang. Ein
Ensemble wunderbarer Dinge und Begebenheiten, z. B. eine
dMusNkalische Pbantasie, die harmonischen Folgen einer Aeolsharfe,
die Natur slebst. . . . . . . . . . .

"In einem echten Mahrchen muss ailes wunderbar, geheimnissvoll
undzusammenhangendsein; alles belebt, jeder auf eineandereArt Die
ganze Natur muss wunderlich mit der ganzen Geisterwelt gemiseht sein;
hier tritt die Zeit der Anarehie, der Gesetzlosigkeit Frelheit, der
Naturstand der Natur, die Zeit von der Welt ein entgegengesetztes und
eben daruel'ndiehr Weld der Wahrheit durehaus Chaos der vollendeten
Sehopfung ahnlich ist."--NOVALIS.
~

CHAPTER 1
"A spirit . . . . . . . . . The undulating and silent well, And rippling
rivulet, and evening gloom, Now deepening the dark shades, for speech
assuming, Held commune with him; as if he and it Were all that was."
SHELLEY'S Alastor.
I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which
accompanies the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through
the eastern window of my room, a faint streak of peach- colour,
dividing a cloud that just rose above the low swell of the horizon,
announced the approach of the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and
apparently dreamless sleep had dissolved, began again to assume
crystalline forms, the strange events of the foregoing night presented
themselves anew to my wondering consciousness. The day before had
been my one-and-twentieth birthday. Among other ceremonies
investing me with my legal rights, the keys of an old secretary, in
which my father had kept his private papers, had been delivered up to
me. As soon as I was left alone, I ordered lights in the chamber where
the secretary stood, the first lights that had been there for many a year;
for, since my father's death, the room had been left undisturbed. But, as
if the darkness had been too long an inmate to be easily expelled, and
had dyed with blackness the walls to which, bat-like, it had clung, these
tapers served but ill to light up the gloomy hangings, and seemed to
throw yet darker shadows into the hollows of the deep-wrought cornice.

All the further portions of the room lay shrouded in a mystery whose
deepest folds were gathered around the dark oak cabinet which I now
approached with a strange mingling of reverence and curiosity. Perhaps,
like a geologist, I was about to turn up to the light some of the buried
strata of the human world, with its fossil remains charred by passion
and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to learn how my father, whose
personal history was unknown to me, had woven his web of story; how
he had found the world, and how the world had left him. Perhaps I was
to find only the records of lands and moneys, how gotten and how
secured; coming down from strange men, and through troublous times,
to me, who knew little or nothing of them all. To solve my speculations,
and to dispel the awe which was fast gathering around me as if the dead
were drawing near, I approached the secretary; and having found the
key that fitted the upper portion, I opened it with some difficulty, drew
near it a heavy high-backed chair, and sat down before a multitude of
little drawers and slides and pigeon-holes. But the door of a little
cupboard in the centre especially attracted my interest, as if there lay
the secret of this long-hidden world. Its key I found.
One of the rusty hinges cracked and broke as I opened the door: it
revealed a number of small pigeon-holes. These, however, being but
shallow compared with the depth of those around the little cupboard,
the outer ones reaching to the back of the desk, I concluded that there
must be some accessible space behind; and found, indeed, that they
were formed in a separate framework, which admitted of the whole
being pulled out in one piece. Behind, I found a sort of flexible
portcullis of small bars of wood laid close together horizontally. After
long search, and trying many ways to move it, I discovered at last a
scarcely projecting point of steel on one side. I pressed this repeatedly
and hard with the point of an old tool that was lying near, till at length
it yielded inwards; and the little slide, flying up suddenly, disclosed a
chamber--empty, except that in one corner lay a little heap of withered
rose-leaves, whose long- lived scent had long since departed; and, in
another, a small packet of papers, tied with a bit of ribbon, whose
colour had gone with the rose-scent. Almost fearing to touch them, they
witnessed