the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a
pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision. But
the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or the magic glory of the
prismal waters. Form adds its grace to the loveliness of color and
the play of light and shadow. The structures, the work of astraea,
madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a singular resemblance to
fabrications of the architect. One massive dome or archway, a hundred
feet in diameter, rises to the surface. Its front is carved in
elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae, looking like the fret-and
flower-work that covers Saracenic architecture. Looking through
this into the violet ambuscade, the eye falls upon colonnades,
light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that seem to support the
paly-golden, lustrous roof. It is curiously like a vast temple,
spreading every way in vault and colonnade, on which religious
enthusiasm or barbaric royalty has worked with a reckless waste of
art and labor. Nor is it the cold and shapely beauty of the stone: it
seems to be a temple built of many-colored glass. To understand the
magnificence of the wonderful structure, the reader must have in
mind the laws affecting light in transmission through water--the
frangibility of the rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion,
reflection, interference and accidental and complementary color. He
must recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae
or fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters
it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver fire or flashing
steel. When the mind has conceived of that, there is to add the vivid
beauty of the living coral, its hue of molten colored glass spreading
a radiant mucus over the stony skeleton.

But he has not yet entered into an entire conception of its
loveliness. The arborescent and phaenogamous forms of the coral are to