Of course I was not for an instant deceived by all this:  I knew that under it all lay a particularly forbidding and inhospitable expanse of sagebrush and cactus, peopled with nothing more nearly akin to me than prairie dogs, ground owls and jackass rabbits—­that with these exceptions the desert was as desolate as the environment of Ozymandias’ “vast and trunkless legs of stone.”  But as a show it was surely the most enchanting that human eyes had ever looked on, and after more years than I care to count it remains one of memory’s most precious possessions.  The one thing which always somewhat impairs the illusion in such instances—­the absence of the horizon water-line—­did not greatly abate the vraisemblance in this, for the large island in the distance nearly closed the view seaward, and the ships occupied most of the remaining space.  I had but to fancy a slight haze on the farther water, and all was right and regular.  For more than a half-hour this charming picture remained intact; then ugly patches of plain began to show through, the islands with their palms and temples slowly dissolved, the boats foundered with every soul on board, the sea drifted over the headlands in a most unwaterlike way, and inside the hour since,

  like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
  Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
    Silent upon a peak in Darien,

I had discovered this unknown sea all this insubstantial pageant had faded like the baseless fabric of the vision that it was and left not a rack behind.

In some of its minor manifestations the mirage is sometimes seen on the western coast of our continent, in the bay of San Francisco, for example, causing no small surprise to the untraveled and unread observer, and no small pain to the spirits of purer fire who are fated to be caught within earshot and hear him pronounce it a “mirridge.”  I have seen Goat Island without visible means of support and Red Rock suspended in mid-air like the coffin of the Prophet.  Looking up toward Mare Island one most ungracious morning when a barbarous norther had purged the air of every stain and the human soul of every virtue, I saw San Pablo Bay margined with cliffs whose altitude must have exceeded considerably that from whose dizzy verge old eyeless Gloster, falling in a heap at his own feet, supposed himself to have sailed like a stone.

One more instance and “I’ve done, i’ faith.”  Gliding along down the Hudson River one hot summer afternoon in a steamboat, I went out on the afterguard for a breath of fresh air, but there was none to be had.  The surface of the river was like oil and the steamer’s hull slipped through it with surprisingly little disturbance.  Her tremor was for once hardly perceptible; the beating of her paddles was subdued to an almost inaudible rhythm.  The air seemed what we call “hollow” and had apparently hardly enough tenuity to convey sounds.