They, too, have revelled and feasted, and where are they?—­gone?—­nay, not altogether gone; for doth not the eye catch glimpses of them as they walk yonder in the gray limbo of romance, shining faintly in their coats of steel, wandering by the side of long-haired ladies, with long-tailed gowns that little pages carry?  Yes! one sees them:  the poet sees them still in the far-off Cloudland, and hears the ring of their clarions as they hasten to battle or tourney—­and the dim echoes of their lutes chanting of love and fair ladies!  Gracious privilege of poesy!  It is as the Dervish’s collyrium to the eyes, and causes them to see treasures that to the sight of donkeys are invisible.  Blessed treasures of fancy!  I would not change ye—­no, not for many donkey-loads of gold. . . .  Fill again, jolly seneschal, thou brave wag; chalk me up the produce on the hostel door—­surely the spirits of old are mixed up in the wondrous liquor, and gentle visions of bygone princes and princesses look blandly down on us from the cloudy perfume of the pipe.  Do you know in what year the fairies left the Rhine?—­long before Murray’s “Guide-Book” was wrote—­long before squat steamboats, with snorting funnels, came paddling down the stream.  Do you not know that once upon a time the appearance of eleven thousand British virgins was considered at Cologne as a wonder?  Now there come twenty thousand such annually, accompanied by their ladies’-maids.  But of them we will say no more—­let us back to those who went before them.

Many, many hundred thousand years ago, and at the exact period when chivalry was in full bloom, there occurred a little history upon the banks of the Rhine, which has been already written in a book, and hence must be positively true.  ’Tis a story of knights and ladies—­of love and battle, and virtue rewarded; a story of princes and noble lords, moreover:  the best of company.  Gentles, an ye will, ye shall hear it.  Fair dames and damsels, may your loves be as happy as those of the heroine of this romaunt.

On the cold and rainy evening of Thursday, the 26th of October, in the year previously indicated, such travellers as might have chanced to be abroad in that bitter night, might have remarked a fellow-wayfarer journeying on the road from Oberwinter to Godesberg.  He was a man not tall in stature, but of the most athletic proportions, and Time, which had browned and furrowed his cheek and sprinkled his locks with gray, declared pretty clearly that He must have been acquainted with the warrior for some fifty good years.  He was armed in mail, and rode a powerful and active battle-horse, which (though the way the pair had come that day was long and weary indeed,) yet supported the warrior, his armor and luggage, with seeming ease.  As it was in a friend’s country, the knight did not think fit to wear his heavy destrier, or helmet, which hung at his saddlebow over his portmanteau.  Both were marked with the coronet of a count; and from the crown which surmounted the helmet, rose the crest of his knightly race, an arm proper lifting a naked sword.