Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/60

 be thinner than Castles of Spain, and the white statues fair Emptinesses like the elf women of Northern dreams?—the elves and gnomes and fairies themselves are real and palpable and palpitant with the ruddy warmth of life.

Perhaps thou thinkest of those antique theatres—marble cups set between the breasts of sweetly-curving hills, with the cloud-frescoed dome of the Infinite for a ceiling, and for scenery nature's richest charms of purple mountain and azure sea and emerald groves of olive. But that beautiful materialism of the ancient theatre charmed not as the mystery of ours,—a mystery too delicate to suffer the eye of Day;—a mystery wrought by fairies who dare only toil by night. One sunbeam would destroy the charm of this dusky twilight world. Strange! how the mind wanders in this strange place! Yet it is easier to dream of two thousand years ago than to recollect that thou livest in the material present,—that only a painted ceiling lies between thy vision and the amethystine heaven of stars above, and that only a wall of plastered brick separates thee from the streets of New Orleans or the gardens westward where