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- 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.
Time passed; and the following May, after a gentle shower upon the
mountains—a little shower islanded in misty seas of sunshine; such a
distant shower—and sometimes two, and three, and four of them, all
visible together in different parts—as I love to watch from the piazza,
instead of thunder storms, as I used to, which wrap old Greylock, like
a Sinai, till one thinks swart Moses must be climbing among scathed
hemlocks there; after, I say, that, gentle shower, I saw a rainbow,
resting its further end just where, in autumn, I had marked the mole.
Fairies there, thought I; remembering that rainbows bring out the
blooms, and that, if one can but get to the rainbow’s end, his fortune
is made in a bag of gold. Yon rainbow’s end, would I were there,
thought I. And none the less I wished it, for now first noticing what
seemed some sort of glen, or grotto, in the mountain side; at least,
whatever it was, viewed through the rainbow’s medium, it glowed like
the Potosi mine. But a work-a-day neighbor said, no doubt it was but
some old barn—an abandoned one, its broadside beaten in, the acclivity
its background. But I, though I had never been there, I knew better.
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