The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-Night's Dream'/The Fairy Queen

by Frank Sidgwick

The Fairy Queen

Come, follow, follow me,

You fairy elves that be,

Which circle on the green,

Come follow me your queen;

Hand in hand let's dance around,

For this place is fairy ground.

When mortals are at rest,

And snorting in their nest,

Unheard and unespied

Through keyholes we do glide:

Over tables, stools, and shelves.

We trip it with our fairy elves.

And if the house be foul,

Or platter, dish, or bowl,

Upstairs we nimbly creep

And find the sluts asleep;

There we pinch their arms and thighs;

None escapes nor none espies.

But if the house be swept,

And from uncleanness kept,

We praise the household maid

And surely she is paid;

For we do use, before we go,

To drop a tester in her shoe.

Upon a mushroom's head

Our table we do spread;

A corn of rye or wheat

Is manchet which we eat,

Pearly drops of dew we drink

In acorn cups filled to the brink.

The brains of nightingales

With unctuous dew of snails

Between two nutshells stewed

Is meat that's easily chewed;

And the beards of little mice

Do make a feast of wondrous price.

On tops of dewy grass

So nimbly do we pass,

The young and tender stalk

Ne'er bends when we do walk;

Yet in the morning may be seen

Where we the night before have been.

The grasshopper and fly

Serve for our minstrelsy.

Grace said, we dance awhile,

And so the time beguile;

And when the moon doth hide her head,

The glow-worm lights us home to bed.

From The Mysteries of Love and

Eloquence (1658); with a preface

signed E[dward] P[hillips].

The poem was given by Percy in his Reliques from The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, a curious book of which the preface is signed E.P.; the British Museum Catalogue attributes these initials to Edward Phillips, the nephew of John Milton. But Rimbault pointed out that this song occurs in a tract of 1635, A Description of the King and Queen of the Fairies, attributed to Robert Herrick; a single copy of this pamphlet is known, and is in the Bodleian Library.