The powers of the poet are exerted to the utmost, to convey an idea of their minute dimensions; and time, with them, moves on lazy pinions.
"Come," cries the queen,
Come now, a roundel and a fairy song, Then for the third part of a minute hence: Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds; Some war with rear-mice for their leathern wings, To make my small elves coats.
And when enamoured of Bottom, she directs her Elves that they should
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes; Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs, And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes; To have my love to bed, and to arise And pluck the wings from painted butterflies, To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes.
Puck goes "swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow;" he says, "he'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes;" and "We," says Oberon--
We the globe can compass soon, Swifter than the wandering moon.
They are either not mortal, or their date of life is indeterminately long; they are of a nature superior to man, and speak with contempt of human follies. By night they revel beneath the light of the moon and stars, retiring at the approach of "Aurora's harbinger,"[391] but not compulsively like ghosts and "damned spirits."
But we (says Oberon) are spirits of another sort; I with the morning's love have oft made sport, And like a forester the groves may tread, Even till the eastern gate, all fiery red, Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, Turns into yellow gold his salt-green streams.
In the Merry Wives of Windsor, we are introduced to mock-fairies, modelled, of course, after the real ones, but with such additions as the poet's fancy deemed itself authorised to adopt.
Act IV., Scene IV., Mrs. Page, after communicating to Mrs. Ford her plan of making the fat knight disguise himself as the ghost of Herne the hunter, adds--
Nan Page, my daughter, and my little son, And three or four more of their growth, we'll dress Like urchins, ouphes,[392] and fairies, green and white, With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads, And rattles in their hands.
Then let them all encircle him about, And, _fairy-like_, _to-pinch_[393] the unclean knight, And ask him why that hour of fairy revel In their so sacred paths he dares to tread In shape profane.
And
My Nan shall be the queen of all the fairies, Finely attired in a robe of white.
In Act V., Scene V., the plot being all arranged, the Fairy rout appears, headed by Sir Hugh, as a Satyr, by ancient Pistol as Hobgoblin, and by Dame Quickly.
_Quick._ Fairies black, grey, green, and white, You moonshine revellers and shades of night, You orphan heirs of fixed destiny,[394]
Attend your office and your quality.
Crier Hob-goblin, make the fairy O-yes.
_Pist._ Elves, list your names! silence, you airy toys!
_Cricket_, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap; _Where fires thou findest unraked, and hearths unswept, There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry: Our radiant queen, hates sluts and sluttery_.
_Fals._ They are fairies; _he that speaks to them shall die_.
I'll wink and couch; no man their works must eye.
_Pist._ Where's Bead?--Go you, and where you find a maid That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said, Raise up the organs of her fantasy, Sleep she as sound as careless infancy; But those as sleep and think not on their sins, Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, sides, and shins.
_Quick._ About, about, Search Windsor castle, elves, within and out; _Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room_, That it may stand till the perpetual doom, In state as wholesome as in state 'tis fit; Worthy the owner, and the owner it.
The several chairs of order look you scour With juice of balm and every precious flower; Each fair instalment, coat, and several crest, With loyal blazon evermore be blest; _And nightly, meadow-fairies, look, you sing_, Like to the Garter's compass, _in a ring: The expressure that it bears green let it be, More fertile-fresh than all the field to see_; And "Hony soit qui mal y pense" write, In emerald tufts, flowers, purple, blue, and white; Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery, Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee: Fairies use flowers for their charactery.
Away--disperse!--but, till 'tis one o'clock, Our dance of custom, round about the oak Of Herne the hunter, let us not forget.
_Eva._ Pray you, lock hand in hand, yourselves in order set, And twenty glow-worms shall our lanterns be, To guide our measure round about the tree; But stay, I smell a man of middle earth.[395]
_Fal._ Heaven defend me from that Welsh fairy, lest He transform me to a piece of cheese.
_Pist._ Vile worm! thou wast o'erlook'd even in thy birth.
_Quick._ With trial fire touch we his finger-end: If he be chaste the flame will back descend, And turn him to no pain; but if he start, It is the flesh of a corrupted heart.
_Pist._ A trial, come.
_Eva._ Come, will this wood take fire?
_Fal._ Oh, oh, oh!
_Quick._ Corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire: About him, fairies, sing a scornful rime; And, as you trip, still pinch him to your time.
In Romeo and Juliet the lively and gallant Mercutio mentions a fairy personage, who has since attained to great celebrity, and completely dethroned Titania, we mean Queen Mab,[396] a dame of credit and renown in Faery.
"I dreamed a dream to-night," says Romeo.
"O then," says Mercutio:--
O then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes, In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies, Over men's noses as they lie asleep: Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs; The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces, of the smallest spider's web; The collars of the moonshine's watery beams: Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film: Her waggoner, a small gray-coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid: Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut, Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers.
This is that very Mab _That plats the manes of horses in the night; And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs, Which once untangled, much misfortune bode.
This is the hag,[397] when maids lie on their backs, That presses them_.
In an exquisite and well-known passage of the Tempest, higher and more awful powers are ascribed to the Elves: Prospero declares that by their aid he has "bedimmed the noon-tide sun;" called forth the winds and thunder; set roaring war "'twixt the green sea and the azured vault;" shaken promontories, and plucked up pines and cedars. He thus invokes them:--
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;[398]
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him, When he comes back; you demi-puppets that _By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight-mushrooms_, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew.
The other dramas of Shakspeare present a few more characteristic traits of the Fairies, which should not be omitted.
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, This bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then they say no spirit dares stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planet strikes, _No fairy takes_,[399] no witch hath power to charm, So hallow'd and so gracious is that time.
_Hamlet_, Act. i. sc. 1.
King Henry IV. wishes it could be proved,
_That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged In cradle-clothes our children where they lay_, And called mine--Percy, his--Plantagenet!
The old shepherd in the Winter's Tale, when he finds Perdita, exclaims,
It was told me, I should be rich, by the fairies: this is some changeling.
And when his son tells him it is gold that is within the "bearing-cloth," he says,