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Updated: June 9, 2025
Of all the witches and semi-witches of that eternal Walpurgis night, whose boards represent the world, the ladies of the ballet have at all times and in all places been regarded at least like saints, although Hackländer repeatedly told in vain in his earlier novels, to convince us that true virtue appears in tights and short petticoats and is only to be found in ballet girls.
Even the strongest must perforce part company with him at times, else follow with the eye of faith, for his path oft leads up into that far region where mortals can scarce breathe, over Walpurgis' peaks, through bottomless chasms and along the filmy edge of clouds.
It abounded with dark and goblin passages; it was the whirlwind blowing among the crags of the Jungfrau, and swarming with the forms and cries of the witches of the Walpurgis; it was Eurydice, traversing the corridors of hell; it was midnight over the wilderness, with the clouds drifting before the moon; it was a hurricane on the deep sea; it was every thing horrible, wierdlike, and tumultuous.
She filled his house with rough, heavily-shaded studies of still-life, flowers, and faces of her friends; but of all Hunt's pupils, Miss Cranch, Miss Knowlton, and Miss Lamb were the only ones who achieved artistic distinction in their special work. It was in order to withdraw her from this Walpurgis art-dance that Cranch undertook his last journey to Paris in his seventieth year.
So here we have the old sly Elia, fooling people now as he fooled them in his lifetime, and a riddle both to the godly and the ungodly. The great Goethe, whose Walpurgis Night "He-Apes" made Elia put out his tongue, read, we learn, with no little pleasure some fantastic skit of this incorrigible one. Did he discern the sublime Olympian what a cunning flute player lurked under the queer mask?
Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it, of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey, foxes, and owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach?
If you will allow me, sir, I will ride by your side. Thank God, at least, it is not the Walpurgis night!" "I wish to Heaven it were!" said Vivian, "and that we were on the Brocken. It must be highly amusing!" "Hush! hush! it is lucky we are not in the Hartz; but we know not where we are, nor who at this moment may be behind us."
By a mere coincidence Joachim Raff had written a symphony called "Spring" in 1878, just a year before Paine finished his in America. The first movement in both is called "Nature's Awakening;" such an idea is inevitable in any spring composition, from poetry up or down. For a second movement Raff has a wild "Walpurgis Night Revel," while Paine has a scherzo called "May Night Fantasy."
They leap over the glowing embers or even through the flames. The ceremony is called "burning the witches." In some places an effigy representing a witch used to be burnt in the bonfire. We have to remember that the eve of May Day is the notorious Walpurgis Night, when the witches are everywhere speeding unseen through the air on their hellish errands.
They have their place and their service, and so long as we continue to be what we are now, they will hang on to us, restlessly plucking at the garments which cover our nakedness, nor ever ceasing to twitch them and strain at them until they have stripped us for one of their horrible Walpurgis nights: when the laughter heard is of a character to render laughter frightful to the ears of men throughout the remainder of their days.
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