It had an atmosphere of solemn twilight
tranquillity, and so completely did its unruffled surface blend with
the cloudless, star-studded sky, that, when I looked through my
spectacles at my grandmother, the vision seemed to me all heaven and
stars.
"Yet, as I gazed and gazed, I felt what stately cities might well have
been built upon those shores, and have flashed prosperity over the
calm, like coruscations of pearls. I dreamed of gorgeous fleets,
silken-sailed, and blown by perfumed winds, drifting over those
depthless waters and through those spacious skies. I gazed upon the
twilight, the inscrutable silence, like a God-fearing discoverer upon
a new and vast sea bursting upon him through forest glooms, and in the
fervor of whose impassioned gaze, a millenial and poetic world arises,
and man need no longer die to be happy.
"My companions naturally deserted me, for I had grown wearily grave
and abstracted: and, unable to resist the allurements of my
spectacles, I was constantly lost in the world, of which those
companions were part, yet of which they knew nothing.
"I grew cold and hard, almost morose; people seemed to me so blind and
unreasonable.
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