but this incline, experience soon teaches, is an ocular deception,
the effect of refraction, such as a tumbler of water and a spoon can
exhibit in petty. It is perhaps the first observable warning that you
are in a new medium, and that your familiar friend, the light, comes
to you altered in its nature; and it is as well to remember this and
"make a note on it."

Raising your eyes to the horizontal and looking straight forward,
a new and beautiful wealth of color is developed. It is at first a
delicate blue, as if an accidental color of the prevailing yellow.
But soon it deepens into a rich violet. You feel as if you had never
before appreciated the loveliness of that rich tint. As your eye
dwells upon it the rich lustrous violet darkens to indigo, and sinking
into deeper hues becomes a majestic threat of color. It is ominous,
vivid blue-black--solid, adamantine, a crystal wall of amethyst. It is
all around you. You are cased, dungeoned in the solid masonry of the
waters. It is beauty indeed, but the sombre and awful beauty of the
night and storm. The eye turns for relief and reassurance to the
paly-golden lustrous roof, and watches that tender penciling which
brightens every object it touches. The hull of the sunken ship,
lying slant and open to the sun, has been long enough submerged to
be crusted with barnacles, hydropores, crustacea and the labored
constructions of the microscopic existences and vegetation that fill
the sea. The song of Ariel becomes vivid and realistic in its rich
word-power:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

The transfiguration of familiar objects is indeed curious and
wonderful. The hulk, once gaudy with paint and gilding, has come under
the skill of the lapidary and sea-artist. It is crusted with emerald
and flossy mosses, and glimmers with diamond, jacinth, ruby, topaz,
sapphire and gold. Every jewel-shape in leaf, spore, coral or plume,
lying on a greenish crystalline ground, is fringed with a soft
radiance of silver fire, and every point is tipped in minute ciliate
flames of faint steely purple. It is spotted with soft velvety black
wherever a shadow falls, that mingles and varies the wonderful display
of color. It is brilliant, vivid, changeable with the interferences
of light from the fluctuating surface above,