The youngest of them childishly beguiled
The time when Elfinhart was still a child;
They pinched her fingers, and they pulled her ears,
Or sometimes, when her blue eyes dreamed of tears,
Half smothered her with showers of four-leafed clover,—­
Then fled for refuge to some sweet-fern cover;
But she pursued them through their tangled lair
And caught them, and put fire-flies in their hair;
And then they all joined hands, and round and round
They danced a morris on the moonlit ground.

The years went by, and Elfinhart outgrew
The madcap antics of the younger crew,
(For fairies age but slowly:  don’t forget
That at two hundred they are children yet!)
But still she frolicked with them, though scarce of them,
And learned each year more tenderly to love them. 
But most of all she loved with all her heart
On quiet summer nights to walk apart
And hold close converse with the fairies’ queen,—­
A radiant maiden princess who had seen
Some twenty centuries of revolving suns
Pass over Fairyland,—­all golden ones! 
Sometimes they sat still in the mild moon’s light,
Where chestnut blooms made sweet the breath of night,
And talked of the great world beyond the wood,—­
Of death, or sin, or sorrow, understood
Of neither,—­till the twinkling stars were gone,
And bustling Chanticleer proclaimed the dawn. 
And Elfinhart grew wise in fairy learning;
But by degrees a half unconscious yearning
For humankind stirred in her gentle heart,
And woke a deep desire to bear her part
Of love and sorrow in the larger life
As sister, helper,—­nay, perhaps as wife;—­
For such vague instincts, after all, are human,
And Elfinhart herself was but a woman. 
And yet, for all this new desire, I doubt
If Elfinhart would e’er have spoken out,
And told the fairies of her wish to leave them,
(A wish her conscious heart well knew would grieve them),
If in the ripening of her silent thought
A still voice had not whispered that she ought
To leave that world of love and mirth and beauty,
To share man’s burden in this world of duty. 
(There’s anticlimax for you!  Most provoking,
Just when you thought that I was only joking,
Or idly fingering the poet’s laurel,
To find my story threatens to be moral! 
But as for morals, though in verse we scout them,
In life we somehow can’t get on without them;
So if I don’t insert a moral distich
Once in a while, I can’t be realistic;—­
And in this tale, I solemnly aver,
My one wish is to tell things as they were! 
But not all things; time flies, and art is long,
And I must hurry onward with my song.)
How Elfinhart at last told what she wanted,
And what the fairies said, please take for granted. 
She prayed, they yielded; Elfinhart full loth
To leave, as they to let her go, but both
Agreeing that this bitter thing must be;