nches waved along the
fluid glades until every vista seemed to break through half-lucent
ranks of many-coloured drooping silken pennons. What seemed to be
either fruits or flowers, pied with a thousand hues lustrous and ever
varying, bubbled from the crowns of this fairy foliage. No hills, no
lakes, no rivers, no forms animate or inanimate, were to be seen, save
those vast auroral copses that floated serenely in the luminous
stillness, with leaves and fruits and flowers gleaming with unknown
fires, unrealizable by mere imagination.

How strange, I thought, that this sphere should be thus condemned to
solitude! I had hoped, at least, to discover some new form of animal
life--perhaps of a lower class than any with which we are at present
acquainted, but still, some living organism. I found my newly
discovered world, if I may so speak, a beautiful chromatic desert.

While I was speculating on the singular arrangements of the internal
economy of Nature, with which she so frequently splinters into atoms
our most compact theories, I thought I beheld a form moving slowly
through the glades of one of the prismatic forests. I looked more
attentively, and found that I was not mistaken. Words cannot depict the
anxiety with which I awaited the nearer approach of this mysterious
object. Was it merely some inanimate substance, held in suspense in the
attenuated atmosphere of the globule, or was it an animal endowed with
vitality and motion? It approached, flitting behind the gauzy, coloured
veils of cloud-foliage, for seconds dimly revealed, then vanishing. At
last the violet pennons that trailed nearest to me vibrated; they were
gently pushed aside, and the form floated out into the broad light.

It was a female human shape. When I say human, I mean it possessed the
outlines of humanity,--but there the analogy ends. Its adorable beauty
lifted it illimitable heights beyond the loveliest daughter of Adam.

I cannot, I dare not, attempt to inventory the charms of this divine
revelation of perfect beauty. Those eyes of mystic violet, dewy and
serene, evade my words. Her long, lustrous hair following her glorious
head in a golden wake, like the track sown in heaven by a falling star,
seems to quench my most burning phrases with its splendours. If all the
bees of Hybla nestled upon my lips, they would still sing but hoarsely
the wondrous harmonies of outline that enclosed her form.

She swept out from between the rainbow-curtains of t