than sport with other children. By and by she had a lover, but no
sooner did he show tokens of inconstancy, than the mother came up
from the sea and put him to death, when the daughter pined away and
died. Her name was Selina, which gives the tale a modern aspect, and
makes us wonder if the old tradition can have been modified by some
report of Undine's story.

There was an idea set forth by the Rosicrucians of spirits abiding in
the elements, and as Undine represented the water influences,
Fouque's wife, the Baroness Caroline, wrote a fairly pretty story on
the sylphs of fire. But Undine's freakish playfulness and mischief
as an elemental being, and her sweet patience when her soul is won,
are quite original, and indeed we cannot help sharing, or at least
understanding, Huldbrand's beginning to shrink from the unearthly
creature to something of his own flesh and blood. He is altogether
unworthy, and though in this tale there is far less of spiritual
meaning than in Sintram, we cannot but see that Fouque's thought was
that the grosser human nature is unable to appreciate what is
absolutely pure and unearthly.

C. M. YONGE.




UNDINE

by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque