permitted, got into my yawl--high-pommeled, leather
one--cast off the fast, and away I sailed, free voyager as an autumn
leaf. Early dawn; and, sallying westward, I sowed the morning before me.

Some miles brought me nigh the hills; but out of present sight of them.
I was not lost; for road-side golden-rods, as guide-posts, pointed, I
doubted not, the way to the golden window. Following them, I came to a
lone and languid region, where the grass-grown ways were traveled but by
drowsy cattle, that, less waked than stirred by day, seemed to walk in
sleep. Browse, they did not--the enchanted never eat. At least, so says
Don Quixote, that sagest sage that ever lived.

On I went, and gained at last the fairy mountain's base, but saw yet no
fairy ring. A pasture rose before me. Letting down five mouldering
bars--so moistly green, they seemed fished up from some sunken wreck--a
wigged old Aries, long-visaged, and with crumpled horn, came snuffing
up; and then, retreating, decorously led on along a milky-way of
white-weed, past dim-clustering Pleiades and Hyades, of small
forget-me-nots; and would have led me further still his astral path, but
for golden flights of yellow-birds--pilots, surely, to the golden
window, to one side flying before me, from bush to bush, towards deep
woods--which woods themselves were luring--and, somehow, lured, too, by
their fence, banning a dark road, which, however dark, led up. I pushed
through; when Aries, renouncing me now for some lost soul, wheeled, and
went his wiser way.. Forbidding and forbidden ground--to him.

A winter wood road, matted all along with winter-green. By the side of
pebbly waters--waters the cheerier for their solitude; beneath swaying
fir-boughs, petted by no season, but still green in all, on I
journeyed--my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushed
with vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep
flume clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies
had, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, where
Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to the
wilderness; on, where a huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed
where, in forgotten times, man after man had tried to split it, but lost
his wedges for his pains--which wedges yet rusted in their holes; on,
where, ages past, in step-like ledges of a cascade, skull-hollow pots
had been churned out by ceaseless whirling of a flintst