Page:St. Nicholas - Volume 41, Part 1.djvu/437

1914.] of appeal, that the name of Peter Pan now instantly calls to mind, not Kensington Gardens, but the Never-Never Land.

Yet it is impossible to say that the chance of a permanently haunted Kensington Gardens has quite been let slip. Arthur Rackham has many times put a fine imagination to the service of the finest imaginations that have set the earth aglow —he has created kingdoms of humorous goblins and fairies with rainbow-colored wings: of two-headed ogres with knotted clubs; of gnomes, and dragons, and witch-wives, and other shapes minute and mighty, fearsome and fair—but his magic never held so firm as when he took the Kensington Peter for his theme.

He had done marvels in the Catskills, and was yet to do marvels in the wood near Athens (which is really a wood in Warwickshire). He was to draw Robin Goodfellow (and I do not know who could draw Robin Goodfellow that had not really seen him). But when our wizard did marvels with fairy-land in London, he perhaps made Peter more inseparably his than any other of his creations.

Under the roots that the trees and plants send down into the earth he has fashioned for us an elfin realm so fantastic, so incomparable, so complete, that we can no longer doubt what we should find if, like the icing off a cake, we should slice the top layer off Kensington Gardens. And the seen has as much enchantment as the unseen, the tree-tops as much fairyhood as the tree-trunks, the colors of the Serpentine as much mystery as the glimmering fairy lights which it reflects.

When the wizard shows us the delicate webs of leafless branches traced against a wintry sky, when he paints evening light for us, or pale marbled clouds, or patterns upon water, or children and flowers as well as fairies in the Gardens—then he reveals a magic which Londoners may encounter day by day. And if, through years of apathy, we have grown numb to it, it is from Arthur Rackham that we may catch the angle of true vision again.