Elfin music: an anthology of English fairy poetry

pursues the bright band with his lyre and lamentations; a rock opens before them; he follows them into it and thus reaches Fairyland.

He came into a beautiful country,
As bright as a summer's day sun,
Smooth and plain and all green,
No hill nor dale was seen.
In the middle of the land he saw a castle,
Rich and royal and wonderfully high;
All the outermost wall
Was clear and shone like crystal;
A hundred towers were thereabout,
Strange and strongly battlemented;
The buttresses came out of the ditch
Of red gold, richly arched;
The housour outer casing or facing was decorated all over,
With every kind of different animal;
Within there were wide dwellings
All made of precious stones,
The worst pillars to look upon
Were all of burnished gold:
All that land was always light,
For when it should be dark and night,
The rich stones began to glow,
As bright as the sun does at noon:
No man can tell nor think in his mind
The rich work that was wrought there.

This description corresponds on the whole with the general trend of legend, which represents the Land of Fairyland to be situated beneath the ground, so that the true elfin court is a subterranean

pageantry—a point which is commonly ignored by modern imaginative writers.

The castle that Orfeo entered appears to have been a general storehouse for things and persons who had been spirited away from earth, or had in any way suddenly disappeared.

There he saw his own wife,
Dame Heurodis, his dear life,
Sleeping under an ympe-tree;
By her clothes he knew it was she.

He did not, however, at once claim his bride, but went to the royal hall where the king and queen of Fairyland were seated in a bright and blissful pavilion. Their crowns and clothing almost blinded him with their splendor. Orfeo performs in their presence on his harp and wins such admiration from the king that, with a generosity like that of King Herod a reference to Herod's promise to give Salome whatever she asked, he is promised whatever he may demand. The return of Heurodis is, of course, the favor he asks. The musician-king returns from Fairyland with a wife made more beautiful than ever by the magic of the elfin atmosphere. Unlike the hero of the classical myth Orpheus, who failed to bring Eurydice back from the underworld, he successfully completes his quest and resumes his royal authority.

The addition of several elements, all foreign to each other, into the later conception of Fairyland has helped to create other confusions