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He was always good-tempered, even after these diabolical orgies on some unknown Brocken, and protested indistinctly that there was no harm, "'pon m' wor', ye know, ol' gur'! Geor' an' me half-doz' oyst'r c'gar botl' p'l ale str't home," and much more to the same effect. When did any married man ever take more than half a dozen oysters or take any undomestic pleasure for his own satisfaction?
I was reminded of Faust who, dancing at the Brocken with a young sorceress, saw a red mouse emerge from her throat. "Stop!" I cried. I arose and approached her.
'Well, then, you see, said Herbert over a hasty mouthful, and turning again to his victim 'then you see, when you were just in the pink of condition to credit any idle tale you heard, then I came in. What, with the least impetus, can one NOT see by moonlight? The howl of a dog turns the midnight into a Brocken; the branch of a tree stoops out at you like a Beelzebub crusted with gadflies.
But we cannot quote here the fancies of pure imagination, and we will not speak of Medeus the magician, of the enchantress Armida, of the witches of the Brocken, of the hippogriff of Zephyrus with the rosy wings, or of the diabolical inventions of the middle ages, for many of which the stake was the only reward. Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, inaugurated a more scientific era.
On no account would a witch, when starting for a sabbath, go out through the open door or window; she would pass through the keyhole or up the chimney. While they were gone, inferior demons assumed their shape, and lay in their beds, feigning illness. Assembled on the Brocken, the Devil, as a double-headed goat, took his seat on the throne.
The playfulness of the scene is the very evoker of the solemn remembrances that lie hidden below. The half-sportive interlusory revealings of the symbolic tend to the same effect. One part of the effect from the symbolic is dependent upon the great catholic principle of the Idem in alio. Ascend with me on this dazzling Whitsunday the Brocken of North Germany.
These, though condemned on some grounds by the restorers of authentic church architecture, have, nevertheless, this one advantage that, when the height of a church is that dimension which most of all expresses its sacred character, galleries expound and interpret that height. Euripides. "Spectre of the Brocken."
These are names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar- shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and there is no doubt that they both connect themselves, through links of ancient tradition, with the gloomy realities of paganism, when the whole Hartz and the Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but perishing idolatry.
I wudna hae presumed but that I thoucht, although I dinna deserve 't, for auld kin'ness ye wud say what ye wud advise. 'I'll du that, Francie no for auld kin'ness, but for kin'ness never auld. What's wrang wi' ye? 'Kirsty, wuman, she's brocken oot again! 'I dinna won'er. I hae h'ard o' sic things. 'It's jist taen the pith oot o' me! What am I to du?
So there was Gipsy laughter; and the ancient wicca and Vala flashed out into that sky-rocketty joyousness and Catherine-wheel gaiety, which at eighty or ninety, in a woman, vividly reminds one of the Sabbat on the Brocken, of the ointment, and all things terrible and unearthly and forbidden.
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