Blue vision of depth lost in height,-- sea and sky interblending through
luminous haze. The day is of spring, and the hour morning.


Only sky and sea,-- one azure enormity... In the fore, ripples are
catching a silvery light, and threads of foam are swirling. But a little
further off no motion is visible, nor anything save color: dim warm blue of
water widening away to melt into blue of air. Horizon there is none: only
distance soaring into space,-- infinite concavity hollowing before you, and
hugely arching above you,-- the color deepening with the height. But far in
the midway-blue there hangs a faint, faint vision of palace towers, with
high roofs horned and curved like moons,-- some shadowing of splendor
strange and old, illumined by a sunshine soft as memory.


...What I have thus been trying to describe is a kakemono,-- that is to
say, a Japanese painting on silk, suspended to the wall of my alcove;-- and
the name of it is Shinkiro, which signifies "Mirage." But the shapes of the
mirage are unmistakable. Those are the glimmering portals of Horai the
blest; and those are the moony roofs of the Palace of the Dragon-King;--
and the fashion of them (though limned by a Japanese brush of to-day) is
the fashion of things Chinese, twenty-one hundred years ago...



Thus much is told of the place in the Chinese books of that time:--


In Horai there is neither death nor pain; and there is no winter. The