In half an hour I was moving up an opening in the land with mountains on
either hand, streaky crags at their summit, umbrageous boscage below;
and the whole softened, as it were, by veils woven of the rainbow.

This arm of water lies curved about like a thread which one drops, only
the curves are much more pointed, so that every few minutes the scene
was changed, though the vessel just crawled her way up, and I could see
behind me nothing of what was passed, or only a land-locked gleam like a
lake.

I never saw water so polished and glassy, like clarid polished marble,
reflecting everything quite clean-cut in its lucid abysm, over which
hardly the faintest zephyr breathed that still sun-down; it wimpled
about the bluff _Boreal_, which seemed to move as if careful not to
bruise it, in rich wrinkles and creases, like glycerine, or
dewy-trickling lotus-oil; yet it was only the sea: and the spectacle
yonder was only crags, and autumn-foliage and mountain-slope: yet all
seemed caught-up and chaste, rapt in a trance of rose and purple, and
made of the stuff of dreams and bubbles, of pollen-of-flowers, and rinds
of the peach.

I saw it not only with delight, but with complete astonishment: having
forgotten, as was too natural in all that long barrenness of ice and
sea, that anything could be so ethereally fair: yet homely, too, human,
familiar, and consoling. The air here was richly spiced with that peachy
scent, and there was a Sabbath and a nepenthe and a charm in that place
at that hour, as it were of those gardens of Hesperus, and fields of
asphodel, reserved for the spirits of the just.