The Ice Maiden Page #16

"The Ice Maiden" is a captivating fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about Rudy, a young Swiss man with a tragic past and an unusual ability to communicate with animals. Rudy grows up and falls in love with beautiful Babette, but their love is threatened by the sinister Ice Maiden, a supernatural being who claims the lives of those who venture into her icy realm. The book explores themes like love, death, and destiny, melded with a chilling supernatural narrative and picturesque depictions of Swiss landscapes.

• Children

								

Chillon, and goes far into the deep valley of the Rhone. At every
station strangers alight with red-bound guide-books in their hands, in
which they read of every place worth seeing. They visit Chillon, and
observe on the lake the little island with the three acacias, and then
read in their guide-book the story of the bridal pair who, in the year
1856, rowed over to it. They read that the two were missing till the
next morning, when some people on the shore heard the despairing cries
of the bride, and went to her assistance, and by her were told of
the bridegroom's fate.

But the guide-book does not speak of Babette's quiet life
afterwards with her father, not at the mill--strangers dwell there
now--but in a pretty house in a row near the station. On many an
evening she sits at her window, and looks out over the chestnut-trees
to the snow-capped mountains on which Rudy once roamed. She looks at
the Alpine glow in the evening sky, which is caused by the children
of the sun retiring to rest on the mountain-tops; and again they
breathe their song of the traveller whom the whirlwind could deprive
of his cloak but not of his life. There is a rosy tint on the mountain
snow, and there are rosy gleams in each heart in which dwells the
thought, "God permits nothing to happen, which is not the best for
us." But this is not often revealed to all, as it was revealed to
Babette in her wonderful dream.
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