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- 205
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:55.409Z
- extracted_by
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- start_line
- 154
- text
- still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the
Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the
silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house,
rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the
Barbary coast, an unknown sail.
And this recalls my inland voyage to fairy-land. A true voyage; but,
take it all in all, interesting as if invented.
From the piazza, some uncertain object I had caught, mysteriously
snugged away, to all appearance, in a sort of purpled breast-pocket,
high up in a hopper-like hollow, or sunken angle, among the
northwestern mountains—yet, whether, really, it was on a mountain-side,
or a mountain-top, could not be determined; because, though, viewed
from favorable points, a blue summit, peering up away behind the rest,
will, as it were, talk to you over their heads, and plainly tell you,
that, though he (the blue summit) seems among them, he is not of them
(God forbid!), and, indeed, would have you know that he considers
himself—as, to say truth, he has good right—by several cubits their
superior, nevertheless, certain ranges, here and there double-filed, as
in platoons, so shoulder and follow up upon one another, with their
irregular shapes and heights, that, from the piazza, a nigher and lower
mountain will, in most states of the atmosphere, effacingly shade
itself away into a higher and further one; that an object, bleak on the
former’s crest, will, for all that, appear nested in the latter’s
flank. These mountains, somehow, they play at hide-and-seek, and all
before one’s eyes.
But, be that as it may, the spot in question was, at all events, so
situated as to be only visible, and then but vaguely, under certain
witching conditions of light and shadow.
Indeed, for a year or more, I knew not there was such a spot, and
might, perhaps, have never known, had it not been for a wizard
afternoon in autumn—late in autumn—a mad poet’s afternoon; when the
turned maple woods in the broad basin below me, having lost their first
vermilion tint, dully smoked, like smouldering towns, when flames
expire upon their prey; and rumor had it, that this smokiness in the
general air was not all Indian summer—which was not used to be so sick
a thing, however mild—but, in great part, was blown from far-off
forests, for weeks on fire, in Vermont; so that no wonder the sky was
ominous as Hecate’s cauldron—and two sportsmen, crossing a red stubble
buck-wheat field, seemed guilty Macbeth and foreboding Banquo; and the
hermit-sun, hutted in an Adullum cave, well towards the south,
according to his season, did little else but, by indirect reflection of
narrow rays shot down a Simplon pass among the clouds, just steadily
paint one small, round, strawberry mole upon the wan cheek of
northwestern hills. Signal as a candle. One spot of radiance, where all
else was shade.
Fairies there, thought I; some haunted ring where fairies dance.
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