Raising your eyes to the horizontal and looking straight forward, a new and beautiful wealth of color is developed.  It is at first a delicate blue, as if an accidental color of the prevailing yellow.  But soon it deepens into a rich violet.  You feel as if you had never before appreciated the loveliness of that rich tint.  As your eye dwells upon it the rich lustrous violet darkens to indigo, and sinking into deeper hues becomes a majestic threat of color.  It is ominous, vivid blue-black—­solid, adamantine, a crystal wall of amethyst.  It is all around you.  You are cased, dungeoned in the solid masonry of the waters.  It is beauty indeed, but the sombre and awful beauty of the night and storm.  The eye turns for relief and reassurance to the paly-golden lustrous roof, and watches that tender penciling which brightens every object it touches.  The hull of the sunken ship, lying slant and open to the sun, has been long enough submerged to be crusted with barnacles, hydropores, crustacea and the labored constructions of the microscopic existences and vegetation that fill the sea.  The song of Ariel becomes vivid and realistic in its rich word-power: 

  Full fathom five thy father lies;
    Of his bones are coral made;
  Those are pearls that were his eyes: 
    Nothing of him that doth fade
  But doth suffer a sea-change
  Into something rich and strange.

The transfiguration of familiar objects is indeed curious and wonderful.  The hulk, once gaudy with paint and gilding, has come under the skill of the lapidary and sea-artist.  It is crusted with emerald and flossy mosses, and glimmers with diamond, jacinth, ruby, topaz, sapphire and gold.  Every jewel-shape in leaf, spore, coral or plume, lying on a greenish crystalline ground, is fringed with a soft radiance of silver fire, and every point is tipped in minute ciliate flames of faint steely purple.  It is spotted with soft velvety black wherever a shadow falls, that mingles and varies the wonderful display of color.  It is brilliant, vivid, changeable with the interferences of light from the fluctuating surface above, which transmogrifies everything—­touches the coarsest objects with its pencil, and they become radiant and spiritual.  A pile of brick, dumped carelessly on the deck, has become a huge hill of crystal jewelry, lively with brilliant prismatic radiance.  Where the light falls on the steps of the staircase it shows a ladder of silver crusted with emeralds.  The round-house, spars, masts, every spot where a peak or angle catches the light, have flushed into liquid, jeweled beauty; and each point, a prism and mirror, catches, multiplies and reflects the other splendor.  A rainbow, a fleecy mist over the lake, made prismal by the sunlight, a bunch of sub-aqueous moss, a soap-bubble, are all examples in our daily experience of that transforming power of water in the display of color.  The prevailing tone is that soft, golden effulgence which, like the grace of a cheerful and loving heart, blends all into one harmonious whole.