163 
“His ruff, a daizyie, 
was so neatly trimme, 
As if of purpose it had grown for him. 
bh) His clone was he ae e vel Tet flowers, and a 
kind.’ 
Still another poet writes in name of the elves 
pread— 
Pearly drops of dew we drink 
In acorn cups filled to the brink.’ 
We might delay Bes with the beauties culled from other well- 
known celebrations of the fairies. We can read Shakespeare’s 
interweaving of fics flowers and ne in his sae 
Fairies’ Realm a whole summer day if we betake ourselves to 
Drayton's Baa or to Drake’s Culprit Fay, or Tom Moore’s 
Paradise and the Per: 
will not feel surprise that the association with the fairies 
ian pass imperceptibly into association with magic. Such, for 
example, is that of the old beliefs about fernseed, beliefs blended 
in the thought of the Midsummer Eve, the night of the fairies’ 
special pow 
Shakespeare popularized this medizval belief in the magic 
power - ferns eed when he put in the mouth of Gadshill (1. 
Henry IV., ii., I.) the 
«« We have the receipt-of fernseed, we walk invisible’; 
and he ent the popular belief for all time by the Cham- 
sesia 
“Now by my faith I think: you are more beholden to the night than to fernseed for 
your aa. invisible. 
But the belief in fernseed had a great vogue in the Dark Ages. 
Doubtless some one with more botanical insight than most had 
noticed that ferns do not produce seeds; and that, therefore, no 
one would find fernseed without magic power. 
any the preliminaries pesaiel to the aspirant who 
would ees fernseed. In Styria it was believed to be on Jan- 
