On a Faery Castle by Hilaire Belloc — Read

A woman whose presence in English letters will continue to increase / wrote of a cause to which she had dedicated her life that it was / like that Faery Castle of which men became aware when they wandered / upon a certain moor. In that deserted place (the picture was taken / from the writings of Sir Walter Scott) the lonely traveller heard / above him a noise of bugles in the air, and thus a Faery Castle was / revealed; but again, when the traveller would reach it, a doom comes / upon him, and in the act of its attainment it vanishes away.

We are northern, full of dreams in the darkness; this Castle is / caught in glimpses, a misty thing. It is seen a moment -- then it / mixes once again with the mist of our northern air, and when that / mist has lifted from the heath there is nothing before the watcher / but a bare upland open to the wind and roofed only by hurrying / cloud. Yet in the moment of revelation most certainly the traveller / perceived it, and the call of its bugle-guard was very clear. He / continues his way perceiving only the things he knows -- trees bent by / the gale, rude heather, the gravel of the path, and mountains all / around. In that landscape he has no companion; yet he cannot but be / haunted, as he goes, by towers upon which he surely looked, and by / the sharp memory of bugle-notes that still seem to startle his / hearing.