d in the
North, it brings its wand, and goes wizard-working down the coast. A
spell is about it; enchantment is upon it like a garment; weirdness and
illusion are the breath of its nostrils. Above it, along the horizon, is
a strange columned wall, an airy Giant's Causeway, pale blue, paling
through ethereal gray into snow. Islands quit the sea, and become
islands in the sky, sky-foam and spray seen along their bases. Hills
shoot out from their summits airy capes and headlands, or assume upon
their crowns a wide, smooth table, as if for the service of genii. Ships
sail, bergs float, in the heavens. Here a vast obelisk of ice shoots
aloft, half mountain high; you gaze at it amazed, ecstatic,--calculating
the time it will take to come up with it,--whistling, if you are still
capable of that levity, for a wind. But now it begins to waver, to dance
slowly, to shoot up minarets and take them back, to put forth arms which
change into wands, wave and disappear; and ere your wonder has found a
voice, it rolls itself together like a scroll, drops nearly to the
ocean-level, and is but a gigantic ice-floe after all!

The day fell calm; a calm evening came; the sea lay in soft, shining
undulation, not urgent enough to exasperate the drooping sails. The ship
rose and declined like a sleeper's pulse. We were all under a spell.
Soon the moon, then at her full, came up, elongating herself laterally
into an oval, whose breadth was not more than three fifths its length;
her shine on the water likewise stretching along the horizon, sweet and
fair like childhood, not a ray touching the shadowed water between.
Presently, as if she discerned and did not disdain us,--wiser than
"positive philosophers" in her estimate of man,--she gathered together
her spreading shine, and threw it down toward us in a glade of scarcely
more than her own breadth, of even width, and sharply defined at the
sides. It was a regular roadway on the water, intensest gold verging
upon orange, edged with an exquisite, delicate tint of scarlet, running
straight and firm as a Roman road all the way from the meeting-place of
sky and sea to the ship. Or rather, not quite to the ship; for, when
near at hand, it broke off into golden globes, which, under the
influence of the light swell, came towards us by softly sudden leaps,
deepening and deepening as they came, till at the last leap they
disappeared, more shining than ever, far down in the liquid, lucent
heart of the sea. I