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 accepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know of our life.  In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and I have since many times confirmed it.  One occasion, however, stands out in my memory even more intensely than those I have made bold to mention,—­one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as that out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and made these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister element of air.  I had returned to the West; and while there, wandering in various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel branch—­sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits.  There a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us.  He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made real for one instant of golden time.