THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER
eyed him; he stood, and they rested again. He tried to see through the barrier, but saw nothing but wandering lights that were made by the massing of twilights from the ending of thousands of days, which had been preserved by magic to build that barrier there. Then he called to his mother across that mighty gap, those few paces of airy twilight lying over the fields, which had upon one side Earth and the haunts of men, and the time that we measure by minutes and hours and years, and upon the other Elfland and another way of time. He called to her twice and listened, and called again; and never a cry or a whisper came out of Elfland. He felt then the magnitude of the gulf that divided him from her, and knew it to be vast and dark and strong, like the gulfs that set apart our times from a bygone day, or that stand between daily life and the things of dream, or between folk tilling the earth and the heroes of song, or between those living yet and those they mourn. And the barrier twinkled and sparkled as though so airy a thing never divided lost years from that fleeing hour called Now.
He stood there with the cries of Earth faint in the late evening, behind him, and the mellow glow of the soft earthly twillght; and before him, close to his face, the utter silence of Elfland, and the barrier that made that silence, gleaming with its strange beauty, And now he thought no more of earthly things, but only gazed into that wall of twilight, as
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