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angle of some forty-five degrees, and they were clothed from base to
summit--not a perceptible point escaping--in a drapery of the most
gorgeous flower-blossoms; scarcely a green leaf being visible among the
sea of odorous and fluctuating color. This basin was of great depth, but
so transparent was the water that the bottom, which seemed to consist of
a thick mass of small round alabaster pebbles, was distinctly visible
by glimpses--that is to say, whenever the eye could permit itself not
to see, far down in the inverted heaven, the duplicate blooming of the
hills. On these latter there were no trees, nor even shrubs of any size.
The impressions wrought on the observer were those of richness,
warmth, color, quietude, uniformity, softness, delicacy, daintiness,
voluptuousness, and a miraculous extremeness of culture that suggested
dreams of a new race of fairies, laborious, tasteful, magnificent, and
fastidious; but as the eye traced upward the myriad-tinted slope, from
its sharp junction with the water to its vague termination amid the
folds of overhanging cloud, it became, indeed, difficult not to fancy
a panoramic cataract of rubies, sapphires, opals, and golden onyxes,
rolling silently out of the sky.
The visiter, shooting suddenly into this bay from out the gloom of the
ravine, is delighted but astounded by the full orb of the declining sun,
which he had supposed to be already far below the horizon, but which now
confronts him, and forms the sole termination of an otherwise limitless
vista seen through another chasm--like rift in the hills.
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