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The cardinal himself took part in them; but the chief performers were the young King, his brother Gaston d'Orleans, and the maids of honour, figuring as Apollo and the Muses, or Hamadryads adoring some sylvan divinity. Who has not sympathized in the joy of Madame de Sevigné, at seeing her fair daughter exhibit among the coryphées!
In your place, I should like to know who are the two nymphs, the two dryads, the two hamadryads, who have so good an opinion of us." "I shall know them again very well, I assure you, without running after them." "By what means?" "By their voices, of course. They belong to the court, and the one who spoke of me had a remarkably sweet voice."
"You and the minister and Diccon Demon shall lay your muskets across your knees, and Angela shall witch you into stone with her old, mad, heathen charms. And then and then I will gather more gold than had King Midas; I will dance with the hamadryads; I will find out Oberon and make Titania jealous!"
Here they grew taller and more dense, hanging their cloudy boughs over the giddy depths, and clutching with desperate roots to the almost perpendicular sides of the gorges. In many places they were the primeval forests of Olympus, and the Hamadryads were not yet frightened from their haunts.
There were beside them the Naiads, who presided over brooks and fountains, the Oreads, nymphs of mountains and grottos, and the Nereids, sea-nymphs. The three last named were immortal, but the wood-nymphs, called Dryads or Hamadryads, were believed to perish with the trees which had been their abode, and with which they had come into existence.
They are about the same size as children, "grey and old-looking, hairy, and clad in moss." Their lives, like those of the Hamadryads, are attached to the trees; and "if any one causes by friction the inner bark to loosen a Wood-woman dies." Their great enemy is the Wild Huntsman, who, driving invisibly through the air, pursues and kills them.
Keats, also, in "Endymion," says: "O magic sleep! O comfortable bird That broodest o'er the troubled sea of the mind Till it is hushed and smooth." The Hamadryads were Wood-nymphs. Pomona was of this class, and no one excelled her in love of the garden and the culture of fruit. She cared not for orests and rivers, but loved the cultivated country, and trees that bear delicious apples.
Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the Romaunt of the Rose.
Everywhere in nature Whitman finds human relations, human responsions. In entire consistence with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues his very seas and woods with passion, more than the old hamadryads or tritons. His fields, his rocks, his trees, are not dead material, but living companions.
Hamadryads veiled themselves, each in her conscious tree, eluding human approach. She steals more gently along, that she may haply surprise a vision. The little grassy plain appears beyond the wavering oak-branches. It is reached at last, and there, surely it is no delusion, there rests a sleeping youth! Another step, and she bent aside the boughs. He stands erect, listening.
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