Page:Arthur Racham (1922).djvu/20

 moonlight rides on thistle-down, the court of Oberon and Titania, and the good-natured folk who live in the depths of the sea,—these form the favourite materials of our unmalicious wizard’s fancy. His architectural inventions are perhaps not as surprising as the amazing castles of our own Maxfield Parrish, but his ivy covered turrets and red brick walls mellowed by time, have a special charm. Rackham is happier, however, when he forsakes ordinary human habitations, for the paradise of children or magical realms not meant for mortal feet to tread. He seems to possess the mythopoeic sense of the artists of ancient Hellas, personifying natural forces and creating landscapes which stir our sense of hidden mysteries and suggest weird thoughts. Small wonder that Marcelle Tinayre and a host of other French admirers call him ‘le peintre-sorcier.’ Damp mists brood low upon his hills and veil his gardens of enchantment, which are lit by the scattered light of glow worms. His personified trees, to which a special word should be given, grow on the borderland of dreams in strange hoary forests fit for ghostly rituals, where the owl hoots, the wind whistles, and lost souls or other shadowy visitants flit about. The gnarled trunks, tortured and twisted, have a