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Now we must leave out much more that might be said, and many stories that might be told, about elves, and fairies, and nixes, or water spirits, and swan maidens who become women when they lay aside their swan dresses to bathe; and mermaids and seal maidens, who used to live in the islands of the North seas.
Another tribe of water-fairies are the nixes, who frequently assume the appearance of beautiful maidens. On fine sunny days they sit on the banks of rivers or lakes, or on the branches of trees, combing and arranging their golden locks: "Know you the Nixes, gay and fair? Their eyes are black, and green their hair, They lurk in sedgy shores."
Carlyle to ask me questions; I can get enough of that for nixes. Why don't you go and ask Mr. Herbert Ananias Mead your few questions then you might find out something." There was a slight movement by the door and Carrados knew that the girl had quietly left the room. "You saw that, sir?" demanded the father, diverted to a new line of bitterness.
Can you learn no wisdom from the fate of other generations of fools, but must yourself add another to the catalogue? She is more dangerous than the nixes: the snares which they laid for their victims were cobwebs, compared to the one she is weaving for you. You admire her hair, forsooth!
They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and what not.
He cannot dig down the cliffs, or chain the storm-blasts; and his fear of them takes bodily shape: he begins to people the weird places of the earth with weird beings, and sees nixes in the dark linns as he fishes by night, dwarfs in the caves where he digs, half-trembling, morsels of copper and iron for his weapons, witches and demons on the snow-blast which overwhelms his herd and his hut, and in the dark clouds which brood on the untrodden mountain-peak.
The Paganism of the North, less graceful and beautiful than that of Greece, had still the same tendency to people earth, air, and water with beings of its own creation. The rivers had their Undines, the ocean its Nixes, the caverns their Gnomes, and the woods their Sprites. Christianity did not deny the existence of these supernatural races, but it invested them with a demoniac character.
The German Elves, like those of other climes, have an irresistible propensity to dance and song, especially the Nixes, who, rising from their river or ocean home, will seat themselves on the shore and pour forth such sweet music as to enchant all who hear them, and are ever ready to impart their wondrous skill for the hope or promise of salvation.
There were Nixes in the streams, and Kobolds in the caves, and Tannhauser in the dark pine-glades, who hated the Christian man, and would lure him to his death. There were fair swan-maidens and elf-maidens; nay, dame Venus herself, and Herodias the dancer, with all their rout of revellers; who would tempt him to sin, and having made him sell his soul, destroy both body and soul in hell.
But the professor had gone, I am sorry to say, even further than that; for he had read at the British Association at Melbourne, Australia, in the year 1999, a paper which assured every one who found himself the better or wiser for the news, that there were not, never had been, and could not be, any rational or half- rational beings except men, anywhere, anywhen, or anyhow; that nymphs, satyrs, fauns, inui, dwarfs, trolls, elves, gnomes, fairies, brownies, nixes, wills, kobolds, leprechaunes, cluricaunes, banshees, will-o'-the-wisps, follets, lutins, magots, goblins, afrits, marids, jinns, ghouls, peris, deevs, angels, archangels, imps, bogies, or worse, were nothing at all, and pure bosh and wind.
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