e, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky or
the unlighted spirit,

I well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitated
this conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt and
deeply distrusted. I was born and bred by the sea; its mystery had
passed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least,
not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. But on my first
Italian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of a
stormy sea, and all was strange and solemn--the illimitable tossing of a
wave-world, darkening night after night through weird sunsets of a
spectral and unknown beauty, enchantments that were doorways of a new
earth and new heavens; and, on the tenth day, when I came on deck in
this water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the southernmost of the
Azores, and gradually we drew near to it. I shall never forget the
strangeness of that sight--that solitary island under the sunlit showers
of early morning; it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists and
wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with many near and
distant rainbows that shone and faded and came again as we steamed
through them, and the white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, were
the whitest objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed by, and I could
not have told what it was in that island scene which had so arrested me.
But when, some days afterward, at the harbor of Gibraltar I looked upon
the magnificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of Africa, again
I felt through me that unknown thrill. It was the mystery of the land.
It was altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new sense of the
natural world. Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed
that on the further side I should find the "far west" that had fled
before me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there was
no such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted
me coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. Since that
morning in the Straits, every horizon has been a mystery to me, to the
spirit no less than to the eye; and truths have come to me like that
lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountain
barriers of Africa thrusting up new continents unknown, untravelled, of
a land men yet might tread as common ground.

"A poet's mood"--I know what once I should have said. But mystery I then
accep