scarce permitted to indulge its vent in the common channel of the senses,
breaks forth into those vague yearnings, those lofty aspirations, which
pine for the Bright, the Far, the Unattained. It is "the desire of the
moth for the star;" it is the love of the soul!

Gertrude was advised by the faculty to try a southern climate; but
Gertrude was the daughter of a German mother, and her young fancy had
been nursed in all the wild legends and the alluring visions that belong
to the children of the Rhine. Her imagination, more romantic than
classic, yearned for the vine-clad hills and haunted forests which are so
fertile in their spells to those who have once drunk, even sparingly, of
the Literature of the North. Her desire strongly expressed, her declared
conviction that if any change of scene could yet arrest the progress of
her malady it would be the shores of the river she had so longed to
visit, prevailed with her physicians and her father, and they consented
to that pilgrimage along the Rhine on which Gertrude, her father, and her
lover were now bound.

It was by the green curve of the banks which the lovers saw from the
heights of Bruges that our fairy travellers met. They were reclining on
the water-side, playing at dominos with eye-bright and the black specks
of the trefoil; namely, Pipalee, Nip, Trip, and the lord treasurer (for
that was all the party selected by the queen for her travelling
_cortege_), and waiting for her Majesty, who, being a curious little elf,
had gone round the town to reconnoitre.

"Bless me!" said the lord treasurer; "what a mad freak is this! Crossing
that immense pond of water! And was there ever such bad grass as this?
One may see that the fairies thrive ill here."