develop rapidly, I'm sure, under such skyey influences. The
temperature is genial, balmy breezes blow, there is no feeling of
chilliness; the sea, bathed in silver, glistens in the moonlight;
we sit under awnings and glide through the water. The loneliness
of this great ocean I find very impressive--so different from the
Atlantic pathway--we are so terribly alone, a speck in the
universe; the sky seems to enclose us in a huge inverted bowl, and
we are only groping about, as it were, to find a way out; it is
equidistant all around us; nothing but clouds and water. But as we
sail westward we have every night a magnificent picture. I have
never seen such resplendent sunsets as these: we seem nightly to
be just approaching the gates of Enchanted Land; through the
clouds, in beautiful perspective, shine the gardens of the
Hesperides, and imagination readily creates fairy lands beyond,
peopled with spirits and fays. It is not so much the gorgeousness
of the colors as their variety which gives these sunsets a
character of their own; one can find anything he chooses in their
infinite depths. Turner must have seen such in his mind's eye. "I
never saw such sunsets as these you paint," said the critic of his
style. "No; don't you wish you could?" was the reply. But I think
even a prosaic critic would feel that these Pacific pictures have
a spiritual sense beyond the letter, unless, indeed, he were
Wordsworth's friend, to whom

"A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

He, of course, is hopeless.