ough half-lucent ranks of
many-colored drooping silken pennons. What seemed to be either fruits or
flowers, pied with a thousand hues, lustrous and ever-varying, bubbled
from the crowns of this fairy foliage. No hills, no lakes, no rivers,
no forms animate or inanimate, were to be seen, save those vast auroral
copses that floated serenely in the luminous stillness, with leaves and
fruits and flowers gleaming with unknown fires, unrealizable by mere
imagination.

How strange, I thought, that this sphere should be thus condemned to
solitude! I had hoped, at least, to discover some new form of animal
life, perhaps of a lower class than any with which we are at present
acquainted, but still some living organism. I found my newly discovered
world, if I may so speak, a beautiful chromatic desert.

While I was speculating on the singular arrangements of the internal
economy of Nature, with which she so frequently splinters into atoms our
most compact theories, I thought I beheld a form moving slowly through
the glades of one of the prismatic forests. I looked more attentively,
and found that I was not mistaken. Words can not depict the anxiety with
which I awaited the nearer approach of this mysterious object. Was it
merely some inanimate substance, held in suspense in the attenuated
atmosphere of the globule, or was it an animal endowed with vitality
and motion? It approached, flitting behind the gauzy, colored veils of
cloud-foliage, for seconds dimly revealed, then vanishing. At last the
violet pennons that trailed nearest to me vibrated; they were gently
pushed aside, and the form floated out into the broad light.

It was a female human shape. When I say human, I mean it possessed the
outlines of humanity; but there the analogy ends. Its adorable beauty
lifted it illimitable heights beyond the loveliest daughter of Adam.

I can not, I dare not, attempt to inventory the charms of this divine
revelation of perfect beauty. Those eyes of mystic violet, dewy and
serene, evade my words. Her long, lustrous hair following her glorious
head in a golden wake, like the track sown in heaven by a falling star,
seems to quench my most burning phrases with its splendors. If all the
bees of Hybla nestled upon my lips, they would still sing but hoarsely
the wondrous harmonies of outline that inclosed her form.

She swept out from between the rainbow-curtains of the cloud-trees into
the broad sea of light that lay beyond. Her motions we