The Gnomes. "Day's dazzling light annoys, The cunning gnomes, who dwell Deep underneath earth's shell." From the German. REPAIR we to the home of the Gnomes-to the stalactite cavern, where Fancy may revel and Imagination soar! Where every hue of the rainbow, every sparkle of the gem, and every metal's sheen shall be reflected in the light of the torch we bear in our hands! Before us, a perspective of brilliancy; a crystalline canopy overhead, which, in the torch flame, sparkles with a myriad diamond rays, and upon whose surface multitudes of sparry globules rival the charms of burnished gold. Beauty and grace displayed everywhere in the architecture of the stalactite columns which support the roof; in the simulated forms of altars, trees, and stony organ-barrels which meet our gaze on every side; and in the grouping of the transparent tubes which depend from the ceiling, now hanging singly like monster icicles, now clustering into elegant chandeliers, and now twirling in spiral and festoon, imitating the most elaborate Gothic tracery. Passing onward through antechambers and corridors of seeming porphyry and jasper, our ears are saluted by the trickle and fall of large heavy drops of water, the only sounds to be heard in this vast and wonderful Gnome Palace. Now we reach a vaulted chamber, the roof of which is sustained by arches springing from pillars of every form and colour. The floor is inlaid with chequered slabs; the walls are composed of broken and detached masses of rock, piled one upon another in picturesque irregularity; while high above us fantastic forms of stalactite are arranged with a grandeur beyond the workmanship of mortal. We enter another apartment still more magnificent. Its walls are of purple marble, embellished with branching sprays of rock crystal, which, on the purple ground, assume the hue of the amethyst. The festoons of jewelled flowers, and the brilliant scroll-work of the ceiling; the cascades of crystal suddenly arrested into rigidity, and the uneven pavement of gold and red, green and azure, underneath our feet, combine to produce an effect of unparalleled grandeur. Our eyes are dazzled by the scene, and our footsteps are arrested by a vague terror born of so much weird beauty, while our mind is enthralled by its presence. We are deep, deep down in the bowels of the earth, trespassers in the land of the creatures whom "light annoys." Shall we extinguish our torch, and so allow the thick darkness to fall upon us like a pall? Shall we restore to these subterranean chambers their native gloom? And shall we invoke, by such an act, the presence of those weird beings whom "darkness joys?" The consequence of our deed would be, not an apparition of the gnomes, but the loss of the track by which we entered these gorgeous caverns now grim and gloomy. Our danger would thus be in the absence of living creatures, and not in their presence. Science, which wars against ignorance on the earth above, has descended to these depths to strike the sceptre from the hand of the Gnome King, and to banish his subjects to the mysterious regions of No-man's-land, leaving only these jewelled caves to astonish and delight us. The old story-tellers, whose rich and active fancy peopled the air with sylphs, and the waters with nymphs, created the gnomes to be the guardians of the untold wealth of these subterranean realms. Queer little fellows were these underground people, and wonderful stories have been related of them. In the night, when mortals were fast asleep, they would sometimes ascend to the moon-lit surface of the earth, and dance about the hills till cock-crow. Some say that they had no music but howling and whimpering, and that the sounds which proceeded from their midnight assemblies were often mistaken S |