massive, and still, and awful, terrible affirmations of the verity
of the Ideal. For this world of colossal heights and fathomless
gulfs, of blinding snows, of primeval silence, of infinite revelation,
of splendid lights upon manifold summits of opal, topaz, and sardony,
all seemed to him the witness and visible manifestation of his most
secret and dreadful thoughts. He had seen these things in his
visions, he had shaped them in his hidden reveries, he had dared
to believe that such a region as this might be--nay, ought to be--
if the universe were of Divine making. And now it burst upon him,
an apocalypse of giant glories, an empire of absolute being,
independent and careless of human presence, affirming itself
eternally to its own immeasurable solitudes.

"I have reached the top and pinnacle of life," cried the poet; "this
is the world wherein all things are made!"

And now, indeed, save for the fairy bird, he trod his path alone.
Now and then great clouds of mist swept down from the heights, or
rose from the icy gorges, and wrapped him in their soft gray folds,
hiding from his sight the glittering expanse around him, and making
him afraid. Or, at times, he beheld his own shadow, a vast and
portentous Self, projected on the nebulous air, and looming in his
pathway, a solitary monster threatening him with doom. Or yet
again, there arose before him, multiplied in bewildering eddies
of fog-wreath, a hundred spectral selves, each above and behind
the other, like images repeated in reverberating mirrors--his own
form, his own mien, his own garb and aspect--appalling in their
omnipresence, maddening in their grotesque immensity as the goblins
of a fever dream. But when first the traveler beheld this sight,
and shrank at it, feeling for his sword, the fairy bird at his