C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Song: ‘The fairy dwells in the rocky hall’

From ‘Correggio’: Translation of Sir Theodore Martin

THE FAIRY dwells in the rocky hall,

The pilgrim sits by the waterfall;

The waters tumble as white as snow,

From the rocks above to the pool below:

“Sir Pilgrim, plunge in the dashing spray,

And you shall be my own love alway!

“From the bonds of the body thy soul I’ll free;

Thou shalt merrily dance in the woods with me.

Sir Pilgrim, into the waters dash,

And ivory white thy bones I’ll wash.

Deep, deep shalt thou rest in my oozy home,

And the waterfall o’er thee shall burst in foam.”

The pilgrim he thrills, and to rise were fain,

But his limbs are so weary, he strives in vain.

The fairy she comes with her golden hair,

And she hands him a goblet of water fair;

He drinks the cool draught, and he feels amain

The frenzy of fever in heart and brain.

It chills his marrow, it chills his blood,

He has drunken of death’s deceitful flood;

Pale, pale he sinks on the roses red,—

There lies the pilgrim, and he is dead.

The whirlpool sweeps him far down, and there

His bones ’mongst the sedges lie blanched and bare.

And now from the body the soul is free,

Now at midnight it comes to the greenwood tree:

In spring, when the mountain stream runs high,

His ghost with the fairy goes dancing by;

Then shines through the forest the wan moon’s beam,

And through the clear waters his white bones gleam.