Thy flame-wood lamp is quench’d and darkAnd thy wings are dyed with a deadly stain.
The Ouphe being in this predicament, it has become necessary that his case and crime should be investigated by a jury of his fellows, and to this end the “shadowy tribes of air” are summoned by the “sentry elve” who has been awakened by the “wood-tick”— are summoned we say to the “elfin-court” at midnight to hear the doom of the Culprit Fay.
“Had a stain been found on the earthly fair,” whose blandishments so bewildered the little Ouphe, his punishment would have been severe indeed. In such case he would have been (as we learn from the Fairy judge’s exposition of the criminal code,)
Tied to the hornet’s shardy wings;
Tossed on the pricks of nettles’ stings;
Or seven long ages doomed to dwell
With the lazy worm in the walnut shell;
Or every night to writhe and bleed
Beneath the tread of the centipede,
Or bound in a cobweb dungeon dim
His jailer a spider huge and grim,
Amid the carrion bodies to lie
Of the worm and the bug and the murdered fly-
Fortunately, however, for the Culprit, his mistress is proved to be of “sinless mind” and under such redeeming circumstances the sentence is, mildly, as follows —
Thou shalt seek the beach of sand
Where the water bounds the elfin land,
Thou shalt watch the oozy brine
Till the sturgeon leaps in the bright moonshine,
Then dart the glistening arch below,
And catch a drop from his silver bow.
If the spray-bead be won
The stain of thy wing is washed away,
But another errand must be done
Ere thy crime be lost for aye;
Thy flame-wood lamp is quenched and dark,
Thou must re-illume its spark.
Mount thy steed and spur him high
To the heaven’s blue canopy,
And when thou seest a shooting star
Follow it fast and follow it far
The last faint spark of its burning train
Shall light the elfin lamp again.
Upon this sin, and upon this sentence, depends the web of the narrative, which is now occupied with the elfin difficulties overcome by the Ouphe in washing away the stain of his wing, and re-illuming his flame-wood lamp. His soiled pinion having lost its power, he is under the necessity of wending his way on foot from the Elfin court upon Cronest to the river beach at its base. His path is encumbered at every step with “bog and briar,” with “brook and mire,” with “beds of tangled fern,” with “groves of night-shade,” and with the minor evils of ant and snake. Happily, however, a spotted toad coming in sight, our adventurer jumps upon her back, and “bridling her mouth with a silk-weed twist” bounds merrily along
Till the mountain’s magic verge is past
And the beach of sand is reached at last.
Alighting now from his “courser-toad” the Ouphe folds his wings around his bosom, springs on a rock, breathes a prayer, throws his arms above his head,
Then tosses a tiny curve in air
And plunges in the waters blue.
Here, however, a host of difficulties await him by far too multitudinous to enumerate. We will content ourselves with simply stating the names of his most respectable assailants. These are the “spirits of the wave” dressed in “snail-plate armor” and aided by the “mailed shrimp,” the “prickly prong,” the “blood-red leech,” the “stony star-fish,” the “jellied quarl,” the “soldier-crab,” and the “lancing squab.” But the hopes of our hero are high, and his limbs are strong, so
He spreads his arms like the swallow’s wing,
And throws his feet with a frog-like fling.
All however, is to no purpose.
On his thigh the leech has fixed his hold,
The quarl’s long arms are round him roll’d,
The prickly prong has pierced his skin,
And the squab has thrown his javelin,
The gritty star has rubb’d him raw,
And the crab has struck with his giant claw;
He bawls with rage, and he shrieks with pain
He strikes around but his blows are vain-
So then,
He turns him round and flies amain
With hurry and dash to the beach again.
Arrived safely on land our Fairy friend now gathers the dew from the “sorrel-leaf and henbane-bud” and bathing therewith his wounds, finally ties them up with cobweb. Thus recruited, he
-treads the fatal shore
As fresh and vigorous as before.
At length espying a “purple-muscle shell” upon the beach, he determines to use it as a boat and thus evade the animosity of the water spirits whose powers extend not above the wave. Making a “sculler’s notch” in the stern, and providing himself with an oar of the bootle-blade, the Ouphe a second time ventures upon the deep. His perils are now diminished, but still great. The imps of the river heave the billows up before the prow of the boat, dash the surges against her side, and strike against her keel. The quarl uprears “his island-back” in her path, and the scallop, floating in the rear of the vessel, spatters it all over with water. Our adventurer, however, bails it out with the colen bell (which he has luckily provided for the purpose of catching the drop from the silver bow of the sturgeon,) and keeping his little bark warily trimmed, holds on his course undiscomfited.
The object of his first adventure is at length discovered in a “brownbacked sturgeon,” who
Like the heaven-shot javelin
Springs above the waters blue,
And, instant as the star-fall light
Plunges him in the deep again,
But leaves an arch of silver bright,
The rainbow of the moony main.
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