in, and
little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their
beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and
the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a
still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line;
but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence
and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising
beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary
coast, an unknown sail.

And this recalls my inland voyage to fairy-land. A true voyage; but,
take it all in all, interesting as if invented.

From the piazza, some uncertain object I had caught, mysteriously
snugged away, to all appearance, in a sort of purpled breast-pocket,
high up in a hopper-like hollow, or sunken angle, among the northwestern
mountains--yet, whether, really, it was on a mountain-side, or a
mountain-top, could not be determined; because, though, viewed from
favorable points, a blue summit, peering up away behind the rest, will,
as it were, talk to you over their heads, and plainly tell you, that,
though he (the blue summit) seems among them, he is not of them (God
forbid!), and, indeed, would have you know that he considers
himself--as, to say truth, he has good right--by several cubits their
superior, nevertheless, certain ranges, here and there double-filed, as
in platoons, so shoulder and follow up upon one another, with their
irregular shapes and heights, that, from the piazza, a nigher and lower
mountain will, in most states of the atmosphere, effacingly shade itself
away into a higher and further one; that an object, bleak on the
former's crest, will, for all that, appear nested in the latter's flank.
These mountains, somehow, they play at hide-and-seek, and all before
one's eyes.

But, be that as it may, the spot in question was, at all events, so
situated as to be only visible, and then but vaguely, under certain
witching conditions of light and shadow.

Indeed, for a year or more, I knew not there was such a spot, and might,
perhaps, have never known, had it not been for a wizard afternoon in
autumn--late in autumn--a mad poet's afternoon; when the turned maple
woods in the broad basin below me, having lost their first vermilion
tint, dully smoked, like smouldering towns, when flames expire upon
their prey; and rumor had it, that this smokiness in the general air was
not all Indian summer--which