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The gardener who had directed the growth of the aquarium believed in kelpies, undines, and mermaids, and had made for them the superbest playground conceivable even by sprites. There were trees, bushes, and plants of yellow and white coral, of scarlet corallins, dahlias and roses, cabbages and cauliflowers simulated perfectly, lilies and heaps of precious stones.
It was to have "a good time," as she would phrase it, and at any and every cost to others. After wearying of the life of a belle, she proposed to marry the best establishment that came her way, and became a leader of fashion. It would seem that not a few fine ladies carry out this simple scheme of life, and never receive a woman's soul. There are Undines at sixty as well as at sixteen.
"Not after she had a soul!" exclaimed Isabella. "An Undine with a soul!" cried Lawrence. "I conceive of them as malicious spirits, who live and die as the bubbles of water rise and fall." "You talk as if there were such things as Undines," said Celia. "I remember once trying to read the story of Undine, but I never could finish it." "It ends tragically," remarked Otho.
I gazed again and again, and, as the darkness above became more dense, the silence of evening more profound, and the moving lights beneath more brilliant, I could have believed them the eyes of the Undines, who had quitted their cool grottos beneath the sea to gaze on the daring ones who were sailing above them.
These gnomes led, for the most part, rather dull lives. Like their cousins, the water-sprites, or undines, they were roguish and shrewd, but had no higher views of life than our katydids and crickets. Indeed, they hardly cared for any thing but frisking about, eating and sleeping. But, after all, what can be expected of creatures without souls?
This German paganism was eminently fanciful it peopled the earth, air and sea with supernatural beings the rivers had their Undines, the caverns their Gnomes, the woods their Sprites, and the ocean its Nixes. Besides these, there were a host of mythological figures the Walkyres or bridal maidens, the river maids; and the white women, Hertha and Frigga.
Then Bluebell sang the "Lorelei," and Cecil invented legends for the lake, till, their rooms being at last prepared, the old nurse swooped down on her charges, and bore them away from the domain of Undines to that of Nod.
Sirens crowd pretty thickly in the Register; only a little less thickly than Undines. Including Sirenes and Sirenas, I found some fourteen and not a yawl amongst them, nor anything of her tonnage.
But it was thought that in the same manner as man by his union with God had won a spark of divinity, so might the sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders by an alliance with man partake of his immortality. And many of their women, whose beauty was more than human, gained a human soul by loving one of the race of men.
The naturalist knows, when he sees these creatures, that they do not form the hundredth part of those which are hidden from human eyes below the surface of the little brook, and that the whole of the stream is as instinct with life, as if it had been haunted by the Nipens, the Undines, and the host of fairy beings with whom the old legends peopled every river and its tributaries.
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