"Criticism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

is principally in the vicinity of West Point on the Hudson. The plot
is as follows. An Ouphe, one of the race of Fairies, has "broken his
vestal vow,"

He has loved an earthly maid
And left for her his woodland shade;
He has lain upon her lip of dew,
And sunned him in her eye of blue,
Fann'd her cheek with his wing of air,
Play'd with the ringlets of her hair,
And, nestling on her snowy breast,
Forgot the lily-kings behest-

in short, he has broken Fairy-law in becoming enamored of a mortal.
The result of this misdemeanor we could not express so well as the
poet, and will therefore make use of the language put into the mouth
of the Fairy-King who reprimands the criminal.

Fairy! Fairy! list and mark,
Thou hast broke thine elfin chain,
Thy flame-wood lamp is quench'd and dark
And thy wings are dyed with a deadly stain.

The Ouphe being in this predicament, it has become necessary that
his case and crime should be investigated by a jury of his fellows,
and to this end the "shadowy tribes of air" are summoned by the
"sentry elve" who has been awakened by the "wood-tick"- are summoned
we say to the "elfin-court" at midnight to hear the doom of the
Culprit Fay.
"Had a stain been found on the earthly fair," whose blandishments so
bewildered the little Ouphe, his punishment would have been severe
indeed. In such case he would have been (as we learn from the Fairy
judge's exposition of the criminal code,)

Tied to the hornet's shardy wings;
Tossed on the pricks of nettles' stings;
Or seven long ages doomed to dwell
With the lazy worm in the walnut shell;
Or every night to writhe and bleed
Beneath the tread of the centipede,
Or bound in a cobweb dungeon dim
His jailer a spider huge and grim,
Amid the carrion bodies to lie
Of the worm and the bug and the murdered fly-

Fortunately, however, for the Culprit, his mistress is proved to
be of "sinless mind" and under such redeeming circumstances the
sentence is, mildly, as follows-

Thou shalt seek the beach of sand