A Fair Saxon: A Novel (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Fair Saxon: A Novel

A pine tree, according to the poet's pretty conceit, stands lonely in the north, wrapped in a mant.e of ice and snow; it sleeps and dreams of a slender palm which far away in the East mourns lonely on the burning sand. Let us paraphrase the notion. On a single and solitary height rising out of a broad and melancholy waste through which flows a river, often rain-swollen and almost always misty, stands the min of what was once a castle, but which now is given over wholly to the keeping of the bats and owls. On a serene, bright, lonely common stands a sub urban cottage, luxuriously fitted up, only a little too large to be a veritable cottage ornée. A sea divides these two dissimilar structures; and they might be described as far more rigorously divided by a very ocean of traditional, national, and social difl'erences. Yet, if one might ideal ize brick and stone as Heine has idealized living timber, he could imagine the ruin on the hill yearning by anticipa tion towards the cottage on the bright common, or this latter haunted in dreams by the sombre form of the com panion it has never seen. Perhaps the whole mystery and meaning of this story may be prematurely revealed and ex hansted for the reader by this little opening allegory. But there is hardly enough of mystery in the story anyhow to make the reader complain of losing it by premature revela tion.

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