d doom; they are condemned to live until the Day of
Judgment.[19] Many of them were turned into mice or rabbits; as the
Kow-riggwans for instance, or Elves, who meeting at night round the
old Druidic stones entangle you in their dances. The same fate befell
the pretty Queen Mab, who made herself a royal chariot out of a
walnut-shell. They are all rather whimsical, and sometimes
ill-humoured. But can we be surprised at them, remembering their
woeful lot? Tiny and odd as they are, they have a heart, a longing to
be loved. They are good and they are bad and full of fancies. On the
birth of a baby they come down the chimney, to endow it and order its
future. They are fond of good spinning-women--they even spin divinely
themselves. Do we not talk of _spinning like a fairy_?

[19] All passages bearing on this point have been gathered
together in two learned works by M. Maury (_Les Fees_, 1843;
and _La Magie_, 1860). See also Grimm.

The fairy-tales, stripped of the absurd embellishments in which the
latest compilers muffled them up, express the heart of the people
itself. They mark a poetic interval between the gross communism of the
primitive _villa_, and the looseness of the time when a growing
burgess-class made our cynical Fabliaux.[20]

[20] A body of tales by the Trouveres of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.--TRANS.

These tales have an historical side, reminding us, in the ogres, &c.,
of the great famines. But commonly they soar higher than any history,
on the _Blue Bird's_ wing, in a realm of eternal poesy; telling us our
wishes which never vary, the unchangeable history of the heart.

The poor serf's longing to breathe, to rest, to find a treasure that
may end his sufferings, continually returns. More often, through a
lofty aspiration, this treasure becomes a soul as well, a treasure of
love asleep, as in _The Sleeping Beauty_: but not seldom the charming
person finds herself by some fatal enchantment hidden under a mask.
Hence that touching trilogy, that admirable _crescendo_ of _Riquet
with the Tuft_, _Ass's Skin_, and _Beauty and the Beast_. Love will
not be discouraged. Through all that ugliness it follows after and
gains the hidden beauty. In the last of these tales that feeling
touches the sublime, and I think that no one has ever read it without
weeping.

A passion most real, most sincere, lurks beneath it--that unhappy,
hopeless love, which unkind nature often sets between poor