The complete online text of Henry Brocken by Walter de la Mare.

Walter de la Mare's poetry has not received the attention from serious critics that it deserves. It was his misfortune to live through and to be intellectually and poetically unaffected by the two movements in England that shaped the literary consciousne...

Walter de la Mare will be remembered chiefly as a poet and writer of children's verse, the two genres not always clearly distinguishable in his work. But until 1928 he was also a novelist and until the mid-1930s a short-story writer; he was an anthologis...

Walter de la Mare is remembered primarily for his stories and poems for children rather than for his writing for adults. In his own day he was compared to William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, but time has not...

Long ago in the Middle Ages, the tale goes, a priest was climbing the Brocken, the highest peak in Germany's Harz Mountains. As the cleric climbed out of the low-lying clouds onto a brilliant sunlit summit, he was startled by the image of...

The Brocken appears in a number of fairytales. The following is the nutshell version of a story from August Ey's Harzmerchenbuch, published in 1862. A Harz miner pours scorn on claims that witches ride to Brocken Mountain on Walpurgisnacht. "Nonsense," he says....