water as pure and bright as a diamond.
Granite boulders lay around the deep basin, and willows, mountain-ash
trees, yellow-flag lilies, and numberless aromatic plants bloomed about
it, in a realm of meadow as fresh as an English bowling-green. The fine
soft grass was watered by the streams that trickled through the fissures
in the cliffs; the soil was continually enriched by the deposits of loam
which storms washed down from the heights above. The pool might be
some three acres in extent; its shape was irregular, and the edges were
scalloped like the hem of a dress; the meadow might be an acre or two
acres in extent. The cliffs and the water approached and receded from
each other; here and there, there was scarcely width enough for the cows
to pass between them.

After a certain height the plant life ceased. Aloft in air the granite
took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and assumed those misty
tints that give to high mountains a dim resemblance to clouds in the
sky. The bare, bleak cliffs, with the fearful rents in their sides,
pictures of wild and barren desolation, contrasted strongly with the
pretty view of the valley; and so strange were the shapes they assumed,
that one of the cliffs had been called "The Capuchin," because it was so
like a monk. Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks, these mighty masses
of rock, and airy caverns were lighted up one by one, according to the
direction of the sun or the caprices of the atmosphere; they caught
gleams of gold, dyed themselves in purple; took a tint of glowing
rose-color, or turned dull and gray. Upon the heights a drama of color
was always to be seen, a play of ever-shifting iridescent hues like
those on a pigeon's breast.

Oftentimes at sunrise or at sunset a ray of bright sunlight would
penetrate between two sheer surfaces of lava, that might have been split
apart by a hatchet, to the very depths of that pleasant little garden,
where it would play in the waters of the pool, like a beam of golden
light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain,
that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun rose above
the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with water,
its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano glowed again, and
its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and vegetation, gave color
to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this forgotten corner of the
earth.

As Raphael reached it, he notice