“Behold!” cried the friendly Fay, after we had traversed for some time the flowery wilds, “yonder is the City of the Fairies!”

Long indeed had my eyes been fixed upon a great, clear light, gleaming through a considerable cluster of luxuriantly foliaged trees, beneath whose spreading branches flitted and reposed numerous aerial beings, resembling my beautiful guide.  Love, joy, innocence, and everlasting peace were sensibly expressed in their angelic countenances; and sweet were the words, precious the benisons, wherewith they welcomed a mortal into the Grove of the Golden City!  The glorious light of that city proceeded from the sun shining full upon the palaces of sapphire-coloured crystal, erected in all styles of the richest architecture, each symmetrical in itself, and perfect in design and execution.—­Fairy fancy, in sooth, seem to have been exhausted in supplying models of temples, palaces, castles, porticoes, colonnades, triumphal arches, &c. &c; for here was displayed every species of building of which Earth boasts for ornament and defence, in every order of every civilized nation on its bosom;—­whilst orders and edifices, for which exist no denominations among men, arose and spread themselves—­highly adorned, and richly magnificent—­in this singularly superb and beautiful city.  Not upon the model of Thebes, of Babylon, of Macedon, of Rome, or of Salem, did I, in the excess of astonishment, gaze—­not upon any one of the proud triumphs of Art, ancient or modern; but rather upon a wild, yet exceedingly lovely, combination of, and improvement on, the Beautiful of all!  Gates were there none to this city, neither closing portals to the habitations thereof; for rapine and violence were in that delicious land unknown.  Highly-ornamented apertures, in the fashion of porticoes and arcades, &c., stood ever open for the ingress and egress of the social denizens of this Elfin Eden; and the windows of the shining structures seemed, when the orb of day poured down his glorious beams upon them, each a sun, being formed of entire white crystals, brilliant and spotlessly pure as adamant!  But the dazzling and overwhelming effulgence of the Golden City as far surpasses the power of mortal speech to declare, as did it that of mortal eyes to endure.  The ever-living wreathlets of odorous leaves and rainbow-coloured flowers, thickly clustering and climbing around column and pinnacle, and the shadowing trees, bending and waving with guardian air over and amidst temple and palace, were no defence against this supernatural radiance; but as my dazzled eyes unwittingly closed upon the brilliant vision of the Golden City, my auricular organs became more exquisitely sensible to the tide of heavenly melodies, now rolling in awful and inexpressible beauty around me; my spirit, lapped in ecstacy, quaffed with avidity the majestic stream, and upon me seemed opening the light and loveliness of worlds more enrapturing even, and ineffable, than