But tell me to what saint, I pray,

    What martyr, or what angel bright,

Is dedicate this holy day,

    Which brings you here so gaily dight?

 

Dost thou not, simple Palmer, know,

    What every child can tell thee here? —

Nor saint nor angel claims this show,

    But the bright season of the year.

QUEEN-HOO HALL, BY STRUTT

‘The sole and beautiful inmate of the isle, though disturbed at the appearance of her worshippers, soon recovered her tranquillity. She could not be conscious of fear, for nothing of that world in which she lived had ever borne a hostile appearance to her. The sun and the shade — the flowers and foliage — the tamarinds and figs that prolonged her delightful existence — the water that she drank, wondering at the beautiful being who seemed to drink whenever she did — the peacocks, who spread out their rich and radiant plumage the moment they beheld her — and the loxia, who perched on her shoulder and hand as she walked, and answered her sweet voice with imitative chirpings — all these were her friends, and she knew none but these.

‘The human forms that sometimes approached the island, caused her a slight emotion; but it was rather that of curiosity than alarm; and their gestures were so expressive of reverence and mildness, their offerings of flowers, in which she delighted, so acceptable, and their visits so silent and peaceful, that she saw them without reluctance, and only wondered, as they rowed away, how they could move on the water in safety; and how creatures so dark, and with features so unattractive, happened to grow amid the beautiful flowers they presented to her as the productions of their abode. The elements might be supposed to have impressed her imagination with some terrible ideas; but the periodical regularity of these phoenomena, in the climate she inhabited, divested them of their terrors to one who had been accustomed to them, as to the alternation of night and day — who could not remember the fearful impression of the first, and, above, all, who had never heard any terror of them expressed by another, — perhaps the primitive cause of fear in most minds. Pain she had never felt — of death she had no idea — how, then, could she become acquainted with fear?

‘When a north-wester, as it is termed, visited the island, with all its terrific accompaniments of midnight darkness, clouds of suffocating dust, and thunders like the trumpet of doom, she stood amid the leafy colonnades of the banyan-tree, ignorant of her danger, watching the cowering wings and dropping heads of the birds, and the ludicrous terror of the monkies, as they skipt from branch to branch with their young. When the lightning struck a tree, she gazed as a child would on a fire-work played off for its amusement; but the next day she wept, when she saw the leaves would no longer grow on the blasted trunk. When the rains descended in torrents, the ruins of the pagoda afforded her a shelter; and she sat listening to the rushing of the mighty waters, and the murmurs of the troubled deep, till her soul took its colour from the sombrous and magnificent imagery around her, and she believed herself precipitated to earth with the deluge — borne downward, like a leaf, by a cataract — engulphed in the depths of the ocean — rising again to light on the swell of the enormous billows, as if she were heaved on the back of a whale — deafened with the roar — giddy with the rush — till terror and delight embraced in that fearful exercise of imagination. So she lived like a flower amid sun and storm, blooming in the light, and bending to the shower, and drawing the elements of her sweet and wild existence from both. And both seemed to mingle their influences kindly for her, as if she was a thing that nature loved, even in her angry mood, and gave a commission to the storm to nurture her, and to the deluge to spare the ark of her innocence, as it floated over the waters. This existence of felicity, half physical, half imaginative, but neither intellectual or impassioned, had continued till the seventeenth year of this beautiful and mild being, when a circumstance occurred that changed its hue for ever.

‘On the evening of the day after the Indians had departed, Immalee, for that was the name her votarists had given her, was standing on the shore, when a being approached her unlike any she had ever beheld. The colour of his face and hands resembled her own more than those she was accustomed to see, but his garments, (which were European), from their square uncouthness, their shapelessness, and their disfiguring projection about the hips, (it was the fashion of the year 1680), gave her a mixed sensation of ridicule, disgust, and wonder, which her beautiful features could express only by a smile — that smile, a native of the face from which not even surprise could banish it.

‘The stranger approached, and the beautiful vision approached also, but not like an European female with low and graceful bendings, still less like an Indian girl with her low salams, but like a young fawn, all animation, timidity, confidence, and cowardice, expressed in almost a single action. She sprung from the sands — ran to her favourite tree; — returned again with her guard of peacocks, who expanded their superb trains with a kind of instinctive motion, as if they felt the danger that menaced their protectress, and, clapping her hands with exultation, seemed to invite them to share in the delight she felt in gazing at the new flower that had grown in the sand.

‘The stranger advanced, and, to Immalee’s utter astonishment, addressed her in the language which she herself had retained some words of since her infancy, and had endeavoured in vain to make her peacocks, parrots, and loxias, answer her in corresponding sounds. But her language, from want of practice, had become so limited, that she was delighted to hear its most unmeaning sounds uttered by human lips; and when he said, according to the form of the times, ‘How do you, fair maid?’ she answered, ‘God made me,’ from the words of the Christian Catechism that had been breathed into her infant lip. ‘God never made a fairer creature,’ replied the stranger, grasping her hand, and fixing on her eyes that still burn in the sockets of that arch-deceiver. ‘Oh yes!’ answered Immalee, ‘he made many things more beautiful. The rose is redder than I am — the palm-tree is taller than I am — and the wave is bluer than I am; — but they all change, and I never change. I have grown taller and stronger, though the rose fades every six moons; and the rock splits to let in the bats, when the earth shakes; and the waves fight in their anger till they turn grey, and far different from the beautiful colour they have when the moon comes dancing on them, and sending all the young, broken branches of her light to kiss my feet, as I stand on the soft sand. I have tried to gather them every night, but they all broke in my hand the moment I dipt it into water.’ — ‘And have you fared better with the stars?’ said the stranger smiling. — ‘No,’ answered the innocent being, ‘the stars are the flowers of heaven, and the rays of the moon the boughs and branches; but though they are so bright, they only blossom in the night, — and I love better the flowers that I can gather, and twine in my hair. When I have been all night wooing a star, and it has listened and descended, springing downwards like a peacock from its nest, it has hid itself often afterwards playfully amid the mangoes and tamarinds where it fell; and though I have searched for it till the moon looked wan and weary of lighting me, I never could find it. But where do you come from? — you are not scaly and voiceless like those who grow in the waters, and show their strange shapes as I sit on the shore at sun-set; — nor are you red and diminutive like those who come over the waters to me from other worlds, in houses that can live on the deep, and walk so swiftly, with their legs plunged in the water. Where do you come from? — you are not so bright as the stars that live in the blue sea above me, nor so deformed as those that toss in the darker sea at my feet. Where did you grow, and how came you here? — there is not a canoe on the sand; and though the shells bear the fish that live in them so lightly over the waters, they never would bear me. When I placed my foot on their scolloped edge of crimson and purple, they sunk into the sand.’ — ‘Beautiful creature,’ said the stranger, ‘I come from a world where there are thousands like me.’ — ‘That is impossible,’ said Immalee, ‘for I live here alone, and other worlds must be like this.’ — ‘What I tell you is true, however,’ said the stranger. Immalee paused for a moment, as if making the first effort of reflection — an exertion painful enough to a being whose existence was composed of felicitous tacts and unreflecting instincts — and then exclaimed, ‘We both must have grown in the world of voices, for I know what you say better than the chirp of the loxia, or the cry of the peacock. That must be a delightful world where they all speak — what would I give that my roses grew in the world of answers!’

‘At this moment the stranger made certain signals of hunger, which Immalee understood in a moment, and told him to follow her to where the tamarind and the fig were shedding their fruit — where the stream was so clear, you could count the purple shells in its bed — and where she would scoop for him in the cocoa-shell the cool waters that flowed beneath the shade of the mango. As they went, she gave him all the information about herself that she could. She told him that she was the daughter of a palm-tree, under whose shade she had been first conscious of existence, but that her poor father had been long withered and dead — that she was very old, having seen many roses decay on their stalks; and though they were succeeded by others, she did not love t............