picture, the lustrous heaven of California, looking farther off than
ever through the wonderfully transparent atmosphere, and for that very
reason infinitely more beautiful, bends over all the matchless blue of
its resplendent arch. Ah, the heaven of the Golden Land! To you, living
beneath the murky skies of New England, how unimaginably lovely it is.
A small poetess has said that _she_ could not love a scene where the
blue sky was _always_ blue. I think it is not so with me. I am sure I
never weary of the succession of rainless months, nor of the azure
dome, day after day so mistless, which bends above this favored
country.

Between each stroke of the pen I stop to glance at that splendor, whose
sameness never fails, but now a flock of ring-doves break for a moment
with dots of purple its monotonous beauty, and the carol of a tiny bird
(the first of the season), though I cannot see the darling, fills the
joyful air with its matin song.

All along the side of the hill behind the Bar, and on the latter also,
glance spots of azure and crimson, in the forms of blue and red shirted
miners bending steadily over pickax and shovel, reminding one
involuntarily of the muck-gatherer in The Pilgrim's Progress. But no;
that is an unjust association of ideas, for many of these men are
toiling thus wearily for laughing-lipped children, calm-browed wives,
or saintly mothers, gathering around the household hearth in some
far-away country. Even among the few now remaining on the river there
are wanderers from the whole broad earth, and, oh, what a world of
poetic recollection is suggested by their living presence! From
happiest homes and such luxuriant lands has the golden magnet drawn its
victims. From those palm-girdled isles of the Pacific, which Melville's
gifted pen has consecrated to such beautiful romance; from Indies,
blazing through the dim past with funeral pyres, upon whose perfumed
flame ascended to God the chaste souls of her devoted wives; from the
grand old woods of classic Greece, haunted by nymph and satyr, Naiad
and Grace, grape-crowned Bacchus and beauty-zoned Venus; from the
polished heart of artificial Europe; from the breezy backwoods of young
America; from the tropical languor of Asian savannah; from _every_ spot
shining through the rosy light of beloved old fables, or consecrated by
lofty deeds of heroism or devotion, or shrined in our heart of hearts
as the sacred home of some great or gifted one,--they gathe