Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/559

1858.] The black ducks mounting from the lake,

The pigeon in the pines,

The bittern's boom, a desert make

Which no false art refines.

Down in yon watery nook,

Where bearded mists divide,

The gray old gods whom Chaos knew,

The sires of Nature, hide.

Aloft, in secret veins of air,

Blows the sweet breath of song,

O, few to scale those uplands dare,

Though they to all belong!

See thou bring not to field or stone

The fancies found in books;

Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own,

To brave the landscape's looks.

And if, amid this dear delight,

My thoughts did home rebound,

I should reckon it a slight

To the high cheer I found.

Oblivion here thy wisdom is,

Thy thrift the sleep of cares;

For a proud idleness like this

Crowns all life's mean affairs.

doubt whether any popular legend has ever taken deeper root among the common people and spread farther in the world than the story of Dr. Faustus and his reckless compact with the Evil One. We do not intend to compare it, of course, to those ancient traditions which seem to have constituted a tie of relationship between the most distant nations in times anterior to history. These are mostly of a mythological character,—as, for instance, those referring to the existence of elementary spirits. Their connection with mankind has, in the earliest times, occupied the imagination of the most widely different races. A certain analogy we can easily explain by the affinity of human hearts and human minds. But when we find that exactly the same tradition is reechoed by the mountains of Norway and Sweden in the ballad of "Sir Olaf and the Erl-king's Daughter," which the milkmaid of Brittany sings in the lay of the "Sieur Nann and the Korigan," and in a language radically different from the Norse,—when, here and there, the same forms of superstition meet us in the ancient