Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/492

486 character, merely tolerates the familiarity without any kind of response. In some of these pictorial records, whole rows of elves are seated each beside his or her owl. But this infatuation for owls is evidently of the most transient nature, and would be dissolved instantly on the opportunity of some other diversion, such as a race or a gallop. For this purpose they will mount a flock of small birds, or bound on the backs of the inhabitants of a rabbit-warren, and launch forth on a wild and reckless career. The rabbit, though very delightful to sit upon – his downy back being more comfortable, especially to the unclad, than the best saddle that ever came out of Piccadilly, and his ears pleasanter to the grasp than either snaffle or curb-rein – is yet an uncertain kind of steed, as the many mishaps shown in the course of a run testify; while his habit of disappearing suddenly in a hole is such as the first equestrians can hardly be expected to contend against. Sometimes a troop on the ramble will vault on the backs of a flock of geese, and urge them with outstretched necks and striding webs across the common; but even a goose will turn when rode upon, and a dismounted jockey is being severely pecked by his feathered courser. The back of the lowly beetle pursuing his deliberate way to a point a few yards off, where he may possibly arrive in the course of the night, is not disdained by the elf disposed for equestrian exercise. But the most poetical of all the coursers bestridden by elf or fairy is the bat. A whole company thus mounted are rising into the air from the banks of a reedy lake. No less than four pictures represent Ariel, the prince of elves, as borne thus in solitary wavering flight through the sky. Now he is going aloft in the light of the high full moon, only his face, that of a chubby child, seen over the head of the bat round whose neck his arms are thrown. Anon he is seated gracefully upright, clasping his knees between the brown pinions, himself equipped with short wings like those of a pretty moth, and evidently on confidential terms with his steed, who turns his head upward towards the rider; and in this drawing only, the crescent moon is seen with admirable effect through the elaborate pattern of the bat's leathern wing, while two stars struggle through the dim blue vapour of the air. Again we see him seated with his face to the bat's tail, soaring in a higher, calmer region, no stars above nor landscape below. Lastly, led into forgetfulness of time by the fascinating nature of his excursion, he is surprised by the red streaks of dawn, as they stretch between the dim earth and the awakening sky, tipping with crimson the rocks that bound the small estuary over which he happens to be flying. Why Ariel, who could go swift as an arrow from a Tartar's bow, should have found diversion in so slow a conveyance as the winged mouse, we cannot account for otherwise than by supposing that, while pegged in the entrails of the cloven pine from which Prospero released him, he naturally became acquainted with his fellow-tenants who would be hanging by the heels in that retreat, and formed with them a lifelong friendship, doing equal credit to his head and heart.

The tenants of fairyland seem sometimes to have experienced an impulse towards benevolence or usefulness; but it was probably accidental, and only the result of a desire to amuse themselves.