Some miles brought me nigh the hills; but out of present sight of them.I was not lost; for road-side golden-rods, as guide-posts, pointed, Idoubted not, the way to the golden window. Following them, I came to alone and languid region, where the grass-grown ways were traveled but bydrowsy cattle, that, less waked than stirred by day, seemed to walk insleep. Browse, they did not--the enchanted never eat. At least, so saysDon Quixote, that sagest sage that ever lived.
On I went, and gained at last the fairy mountain's base, but saw yet nofairy ring. A pasture rose before me. Letting down five moulderingbars--so moistly green, they seemed fished up from some sunken wreck--awigged old Aries, long-visaged, and with crumpled horn, came snuffingup; and then, retreating, decorously led on along a milky-way ofwhite-weed, past dim-clustering Pleiades and Hyades, of smallforget-me-nots; and would have led me further still his astral path, butfor golden flights of yellow-birds--pilots, surely, to the goldenwindow, to one side flying before me, from bush to bush, towards deepwoods--which woods themselves were luring--and, somehow, lured, too, bytheir fence, banning a dark road, which, however dark, led up. I pushedthrough; when Aries, renouncing me now for some lost soul, wheeled, andwent his wiser way.. Forbidding and forbidden ground--to him.
A winter wood road, matted all along with winter-green. By the side ofpebbly waters--waters the cheerier for their solitude; beneath swayingfir-boughs, petted by no season, but still green in all, on Ijourneyed--my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushedwith vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deepflume clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddieshad, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, whereJacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to thewilderness; on, where a huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showedwhere, in forgotten times, man after man had tried to split it, but losthis wedges for his pains--which wedges yet rusted in their holes; on,where, ages past, in step-like ledges of a cascade, skull-hollow potshad been churned out by ceaseless whirling of a flintstone--everwearing, but itself unworn; on, by wild rapids pouring into a secretpool, but soothed by circling there awhile, issued forth serenely; on,to less broken ground, and by a little ring, where, truly, fairies musthave danced, or else some wheel-tire been heated--for all was bare;still on, and up, and out into a hanging orchard, where maidenly lookeddown upon me a crescent moon, from morning.
