There was once a poet who lived all alone by the sea. He had built for himself a little house of boulders mortised in among the rocks, so hidden that it was seldom that any wayfarer stumbled upon his retreat. Wayfarers indeed were few in that solitary island, which was for the most part covered with thick beech woods, and had for its inhabitants only the wild creatures of wood and water and the strange unearthly shapes that none but the poet's eyes could see. The nearest village was miles away on the mainland, and for months at a time the solitude would be undisturbed by sound of human voice or footstep—which was the poet's idea of happiness. The world of men had seemed to him a world of sorrow and foolishness and lies, and so he had forsaken it to dwell with silence and beauty and the sound of the sea.

For him the world had been an uncompanioned wilderness. Here at last his spirit had found its home and its kindred. The speech of men had been to him a vain confusion, but here were the voices he had been born to understand, the elemental voices of earth and sea and sky, the secret wisdom of the eternal. From morning till night his days were passed in listening to these voices, and in writing down in beautiful words the messages of wonder they brought him. So his little house grew to be filled with the lovely songs that had come to him out of the sky and the sea and the haunted beeches. He had written them in a great book with silver clasps, and often at evening, when the moon was rising over the sea, he would sing them to himself, for joy in the treasure which he had thus hoarded out of the air, as a man might weigh the grains of gold sifted from some flowing river.

One night, as he thus sat singing to himself in the solitude, he was startled by a deep sigh, as of some human creature near at hand, and looking around he was aware of a lovely form, half in and half out of the water, gazing at him with great moonlit eyes from beneath masses of golden hair. In awe and delight he gazed back spellbound at the unearthly vision. It was a fairy woman of the sea, more beautiful than tongue can tell. Over her was the supernatural beauty of dreams and as he looked at her the poet's heart filled with that more than mortal happiness that only comes to us in dreams.

"Beautiful spirit," at length he cried, stretching out his arms to the vision; but as he did so she was gone, and in the place where she had been there was nought but the lonely moonlight falling on the rocks.

"It was all a trick of the moonlight," said the poet to himself, but, even as he said it, there seemed to come floating to him the cadences of an unearthly music of farewell.

In his heart the poet knew that it had not been the moonlight, but that nature had granted him one of those mystic visitations which come only to those whose loving meditation upon her secrets have opened the hidden doors. She had drawn aside for a moment the veil of her visible beauty, and vouchsafed him a glimpse of her invisible mystery. But the veil had been drawn again almost instantly, and the poet's eyes were left empty and hungered for the face that had thus momentarily looked at him through the veil. Yet his heart was filled with a high happiness, for, the vision once his, would it not be his again? Did it not mean that through the long initiation of his solitary contemplation he had come at length to that aery boundary where the wall between the seen and the unseen grows transparent and the human meets the immortal face to face?

Still, days passed, and the poet watched in vain for the beautiful woman of the sea. She came not again for all his singing, and his heart grew heavy within him; but one day, as he walked the seashore at dawn, it gave a great bound of joy, for there in mystical writing upon the silver sand was a message which no eyes but his could have read. But the poet was skilled in the secret script of the elements. To him the patterns of leaves and flowers, the traceries of moss and lichen, the markings on rocks and trees, which to others were but meaningless decorations, were the letters of nature's hidden language, the spell-words of her runic wisdom. To other eyes the message he had found written on the sand would have seemed but a tangle of delicate weeds and shells cast up by the sea. To him, as he turned it into our coarser human speech, it said:

And that night, when the poet sat and sang, with full heart, in the moonlight—lo! the vision was there once more.... But again, as he stretched out his arms, she was gone. But this time the poet did not grieve as before, for he knew that she would come again, as indeed it befell. When she appeared to him the third time she had stolen so near to his side that he could gaze deep into her strange eyes, as into the fathomless, moonlit sea, and at the ending of his song she did not fade away as before, but her long hair fell all about him like a net of moonbeams, and she lay like the moon herself in his enraptured arms.

To the passionate lover of nature, the anchorite of her solitudes, there often comes, in the very hour of his closest approach to her, an aching sense of incomplete oneness with her, a human desire for some responsive embodiment of her mysterious beauty; and there are ecstatic moments in which nature seems on the tremulous verge of sending us a magic answer—moments of intense reverie when the woods seem about to reveal to us the inner heart of their silence, in some sudden shape of unimaginable enchantment, or the infinite of the starry night take form at our side in some companionable radiance. We long, as it were, to press our lips to the forehead of the dawn, to crush the leafy abundance of summer to our breast, and to fold the infinite ocean in our embrace.

To the poet, reward of his lonely vigils and endless longing, nature had granted this marvel. How often, as he had gazed at the moon rising out of the sea, had he dreamed of a shining shape that came to him along her silver pathway. And to-night the mystery of the moonlit sea was in his arms. No longer a lovely vision calling him from afar—an unapproachable wonder, a voice, a gleam—but a miraculously embodied spirit of the elements, supernaturally fair.

The poet was, more than all men, learned in beautiful words, but he could find no words for this strange happiness that had befallen him; indeed, he had now passed beyond the world of words, and as he gazed into those magic eyes, that seemed like sea-flowers growing out of the air, they spoke to each other as wave talks to wave, or the leaves whisper together on the trees.

So it was that the poet ceased to be alone in his solitude, and the fairy woman from the sea became his wife, and very wonderful was their happiness. But, as with all happiness, theirs, too, was not without its touch of sorrow. For, marvelously wedded though they were, so closely united that they seemed veritably one rather than two beings, there had been a deep meaning to that little song which the poet had found written in seaweed upon the sand:

it had said,

For not even their love could cast down for them one eternal barrier. They could meet and love across it, but it was still there. They were children of two diverse elements, and neither could cross from one into the other—she a child of the blue sea, he a child of the green earth. She must always leave him at the edge of the mysterious woods in which her heart ached to wander, and, however far out into the wide waters he would swim at her side, there would always be those deep-sea grottoes and flower-gardens whither he could never follow. Down into these enchanted depths he would watch her glide her shimmering way, but never might he follow her to the hidden kingdoms of the sea. He must await her out there, an alien, in the upper sunshine, and watch her glittering kindred stream in and out the rainbowed portals—till again she was at his side, her hands filled for his consolation with the secret treasures of the sea.

So would she, from the shore, with despair in her eyes, watch him disappear among the beech-trees to gather for her the waxen flowers and the sweet-smelling green leaves and grasses she loved more than any that grew in the sea. Thus across their barrier would they make exchange of the marvels that grew on either side, and thus, indeed, the barrier grew less and less by reason of their love. Sometimes they asked each other if that other mystery, Death, would remove the barrier altogether....

But at the heart of the woman Life was already whispering another answer.

"What," said she, as they watched the solemn stars in the still water one summer night, "what if a little being were born to us that should belong to both our worlds, to your green earth and to my blue sea? Would you seem so lonely then? A little being that could run by your side in the meadows, and swim with me into the depths of the sea!..."

"Would you be so lonely then?" he echoed.

And lo! after a season, it was this very marvel that came to pass; for one night, as she came along the moon-path to his side, she was not alone, but a tiny fairy woman was with her—a little radiant creature that, as her mother had dreamed, could gather with one hand the flowers that grow in the deeps of the wood and with the other the flowers that grow in the deeps of the sea.

Like any other mortal babe she was, save for this: around her waist ran a shimmering girdle—of mother-of-pearl.

So the poet and his wife called her Mother-of-Pearl; and she became for them, as it were, a baby-bridge between two elements. In her mysterious life their two lives became one, as never before. So near she brought them to each other that often there seemed no barrier at all. And thus days and years passed, and very wonderful was their happiness.

But by this the world which the poet had forgotten had grown curious regarding the life which he lived alone among the rocks. Many of his songs, as songs will, had escaped from his solitude, and floated singing among men; and weird rumors grew of the strange happiness that had come to him. Some of the more curious had spied upon him in his seclusion, and had brought back to the town marvelous accounts of having seen him in the moonlight with his fairy wife and child at his side. And, after its fashion, the world had decided that here was plainly the work of the devil, and that the poet was a wizard in league with the powers of darkness. So the ignorant world has ever interpreted the beauty it could not understand, and the happiness it could not give.

Thus a cloud began to gather of which the poet and his mer-wife and little Mother-of-Pearl knew nothing, and one evening at moonrise, as they were disporting themselves in their innocent happiness by the sea, it burst upon them from the beech-trees with a gathering murmur and a sudden roar.

A great mob, uttering cries and waving torches, broke from the wood and ran toward them.

"Death to the wizard!" they cried. "Death! Death!"

As the poet heard them, he turned to his wife and little Mother-of-Pearl. "Fear not," he cried, "they cannot hurt us."

Then, as again the cry went up, "Death to the wizard!" a sudden light shone in his face.

"Death ... yes! That is the last door of the barrier...." and he plunged into the moonlit water.

And when the rabble at length reached the shore with their torches, the poet and his loved ones were already lost in the silver pathway that leads to the hidden kingdoms of the sea.