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- 2026-01-30T20:48:15.023Z
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- it will cure this weariness, to look on her. No more; I’ll launch my
yawl—ho, cheerly, heart! and push away for fairy-land—for rainbow’s
end, in fairy-land.
How to get to fairy-land, by what road, I did not know; nor could any
one inform me; not even one Edmund Spenser, who had been there—so he
wrote me—further than that to reach fairy-land, it must be voyaged to,
and with faith. I took the fairy-mountain’s bearings, and the first
fine day, when strength permitted, got into my yawl—high-pommeled,
leather one—cast off the fast, and away I sailed, free voyager as an
autumn leaf. Early dawn; and, sallying westward, I sowed the morning
before me.
Some miles brought me nigh the hills; but out of present sight of them.
I was not lost; for road-side golden-rods, as guide-posts, pointed, I
doubted not, the way to the golden window. Following them, I came to a
lone and languid region, where the grass-grown ways were traveled but
by drowsy cattle, that, less waked than stirred by day, seemed to walk
in sleep. Browse, they did not—the enchanted never eat. At least, so
says Don Quixote, that sagest sage that ever lived.
On I went, and gained at last the fairy mountain’s base, but saw yet no
fairy ring. A pasture rose before me. Letting down five mouldering
bars—so moistly green, they seemed fished up from some sunken wreck—a
wigged old Aries, long-visaged, and with crumpled horn, came snuffing
up; and then, retreating, decorously led on along a milky-way of
white-weed, past dim-clustering Pleiades and Hyades, of small
forget-me-nots; and would have led me further still his astral path,
but for golden flights of yellow-birds—pilots, surely, to the golden
window, to one side flying before me, from bush to bush, towards deep
woods—which woods themselves were luring—and, somehow, lured, too, by
their fence, banning a dark road, which, however dark, led up. I pushed
through; when Aries, renouncing me now for some lost soul, wheeled, and
went his wiser way. Forbidding and forbidden ground—to him.
A winter wood road, matted all along with winter-green. By the side of
pebbly waters—waters the cheerier for their solitude; beneath swaying
fir-boughs, petted by no season, but still green in all, on I
journeyed—my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushed
with vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep
flume clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies
had, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, where
Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to the
wilderness; on, where a huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed
where, in forgotten times, man after man had tried to split it, but
lost his wedges for his pains—which wedges yet rusted in their holes;
on, where, ages past, in step-like ledges of a cascade, skull-hollow
pots had been churned out by ceaseless whirling of a flintstone—ever
wearing, but itself unworn; on, by wild rapids pouring into a secret
pool, but soothed by circling there awhile, issued forth serenely; on,
to less broken ground, and by a little ring, where, truly, fairies must
have danced, or else some wheel-tire been heated—for all was bare;
still on, and up, and out into a hanging orchard, where maidenly looked
down upon me a crescent moon, from morning.
My horse hitched low his head. Red apples rolled before him; Eve’s
apples; seek-no-furthers. He tasted one, I another; it tasted of the
ground. Fairy land not yet, thought I, flinging my bridle to a humped
old tree, that crooked out an arm to catch it. For the way now lay
where path was none, and none might go but by himself, and only go by
daring. Through blackberry brakes that tried to pluck me back, though I
but strained towards fruitless growths of mountain-laurel; up slippery
steeps to barren heights, where stood none to welcome. Fairy land not
yet, thought I, though the morning is here before me.
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