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Your mother, if ever you are really jealous, it must be of her! But that she should love me, that is what I doubt and fear. For if you were my brother, Percival, I should be so ambitious for you. A nymph must rise from the stream, a sylphid from the rose, before I could allow another to steal you from my side.
I find her very earliest poetical work, "The Sylphid Queen," thus spoken of in a letter from the second Mrs. Sheridan to her mother, Mrs. Lefanu "I should have acknowledged your very welcome present immediately, had not Mr. Sheridan, on my telling him what it was, run off with it, and I have been in vain endeavoring to get it from him ever since. Frances Sheridan.
One seems to be in fairyland, and looks about for the figure of a sylphid floating upon a gossamer cloud, or a group of fairy revelers tripping upon the blossom-covered ground. Is it all reality, we ask ourselves, or a dream from which we shall presently awake? The large, brilliant flower of the rhododendron is familiar to New Englanders as growing upon a bush eight or ten feet high.
"Where is that?" said Dorel, eagerly. "I do not quite know, little girl; but it is not in the bosom of the earth, and it is not in the sun-bright deep: so I suppose it is over the hills, and far away." "Now I know who you are," said Dorel. "You are the lost sylphid; and people say you have travelled all over the world.
I love the twinkle in your eye; and I am so glad it is you, and no one else, who is my papa; but just the same, and forevermore, I shall keep saying, I was a sylphid!" Sometimes, when she set her white teeth into some delicious fruit, she said with dreamy eyes, "These grapes of Samarcand came across the seas; but they are not so sweet as the fruit in my own garden, mamma."
"If I had known that," said Little One clapping her hands, "I would have been glad of all my troubles! I would have smiled through my tears!" Now I know no more than I have told of this story of the Lost Sylphid. I tell the tale as 'twas told to me; and I wish, with all my heart, it were true.
People praised her beauty so much that she dared not look up to let them see how lovely she was; but she had lost both her father and mother, and her heart ached and ached. She thought winter was coming on; and the world was growing so chilly, that now she must certainly set out for the Summer-land. Then she said, "If I am a sylphid, perhaps my home is over the hills, and far away.
"This poor Cesarini may warn me against myself!" thought he. "Better hew wood and draw water than attach ourselves devotedly to an art in which we have not the capacity to excel. . . . It is to throw away the healthful objects of life for a diseased dream, worse than the Rosicrucians, it is to make a sacrifice of all human beauty for the smile of a sylphid that never visits us but in visions."
It is not among the cardboard glades of the King's Theatre, nor, indeed, behind any footlights, but in a real and twilit garden that Grisi, gimp-waisted sylphid, here skips for posterity. To her right, the roses on the trellis are not paper roses one guesses them quite fragrant. And that is a real lake in the distance; and those delicate pale trees around it, they too are quite real.
Indeed, she seems rather a sylphid of the Rosicrucian system, than aught more carnal; being slighter, lighter, and less than the females of common life, who have something of that coarseness of make which is doubtless derived from the sinful and gigantic race of the antediluvians." "Well, say on, man," quoth Charles. "Didst thou not discover this sylph to be a mere mortal wench after all?" "Who?
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