ut, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel--nipping coldand gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller, bolting bythe snow, in finest flour--for then, once more, with frosted beard, Ipace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.
In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of thesea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, andlittle wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as theirbeach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, andthe purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and astill August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line;but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silenceand the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, risingbeyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbarycoast, 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, mysteriouslysnugged away, to all appearance, in a sort of purpled breast-pocket,high up in a hopper-like hollow, or sunken angle, among the northwesternmountains--yet, whether, really, it was on a mountain-side, or amountain-top, could not be determined; because, though, viewed fromfavorable 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 (Godforbid!), and, indeed, would have you know that he considershimself--as, to say truth, he has good right--by several cubits theirsuperior, nevertheless, certain ranges, here and there double-filed, asin platoons, so shoulder and follow up upon one another, with theirirregular shapes and heights, that, from the piazza, a nigher and lowermountain will, in most states of the atmosphere, effacingly shade itselfaway into a higher and further one; that an object, bleak on theformer's crest, will, for all that, appear nested in the latter's flank.These mountains, somehow, they play at hide-and-seek, and all beforeone's eyes.
But, be that as it may, the spot in question was, at all events, sosituated as to be only visible, and then but vaguely, under certainwitching conditions of light and shadow.
