re delicate
psychologists have called upon us to do, the names FANCY and IMAGINATION
as designating TWO faculties, the fairies belong rather to the FANCY.

Secondly, Accepting for a legitimate thought, legitimately and
cogently signified, the High Marriage which one of these finer
Metaphysicians{I}--instructed no doubt by his personal
experience--prophesies to his kind, between the "intellect of man" and
"this goodly universe," we may say that, regularly, this marriage must
have its antecedent possessing and agitating Love; that this love must,
like all possessing agitated love, have its attendant Reverie. Now,
might one venture to surmise that _this_ REVERIE breathes into the
creating of a fairy?

Does the jealous reader perchance miss in the above proposed eight
several elements the UNITY OF NOTION, which he has all along seemed to
feel in his own spirit and understanding? Let him at once conceive, as
intensely joined, the two permanent characters of _tenuity_ and
_mythological displacement_, and take this compound for the nucleus of
the unity he seeks. About these two every other element will easily
place itself. For a _soul_, he shall infuse into the whole, after in
like manner inseparably blending them--FANCY, and that love-inspired
REVERIE which won its way to us from Grassmere.

And so take, reader, our answer to your question, "_What is a fairy?_"
THIS IS A FAIRY. Are you still unsatisfied? Good. The field of
investigation lies open before you, free and inviting. On, in your own
strength, and Heaven speed you!

* * * * *

The eight or nine tales of sundry length, and exceedingly diversified
matter, contained in the two little volumes of Herr Ernst Willkomm,{J}
which have put us a-journeying to Fairy-land, have begun to produce
before the literary world the living popular superstitions of a small
and hidden mountainous district, by which _Cis Eidoran_ Germany leans
upon Sclavonia: hidden, it would seem, for any thing like interesting
knowledge, until this author began to write, from the visiting eye of
even learned curiosity. Nor this without a sufficient reason; since the
mountains do, of themselves, shut in their inhabitants, and, for a
stranger, the temper of the rugged mountaineer, at once shy and mailing
himself in defiance, is, like the soil, inaccessible. To Ernst Willkomm
this hinderance was none. He discloses to us the heart of the country,
and that of the people whic