At length, when pretty well again, and sitting out, in the September morning, upon the piazza, and thinking to myself, when, just after a little flock of sheep, the farmer’s banded children passed, a-nutting, and said, “How sweet a day”—­it was, after all, but what their fathers call a weather-breeder—­and, indeed, was become go sensitive through my illness, as that I could not bear to look upon a Chinese creeper of my adoption, and which, to my delight, climbing a post of the piazza, had burst out in starry bloom, but now, if you removed the leaves a little, showed millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue, as to make it unblessed evermore—­worms, whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very bulb which, so hopefully, I had planted:  in this ingrate peevishness of my weary convalescence, was I sitting there; when, suddenly looking off, I saw the golden mountain-window, dazzling like a deep-sea dolphin.  Fairies there, thought I, once more; the queen of fairies at her fairy-window; at any rate, some glad mountain-girl; it will do me good, it will cure this weariness, to look on her.  No more; I’ll launch my yawl—­ho, cheerly, heart! and push away for fairy-land—­for rainbow’s end, in fairy-land.

How to get to fairy-land, by what road, I did not know; nor could any one inform me; not even one Edmund Spenser, who had been there—­so he wrote me—­further than that to reach fairy-land, it must be voyaged to, and with faith.  I took the fairy-mountain’s bearings, and the first fine day, when strength permitted, got into my yawl—­high-pommeled, leather one—­cast off the fast, and away I sailed, free voyager as an autumn leaf.  Early dawn; and, sallying westward, I sowed the morning before me.

Some miles brought me nigh the hills; but out of present sight of them.  I was not lost; for road-side golden-rods, as guide-posts, pointed, I doubted not, the way to the golden window.  Following them, I came to a lone and languid region, where the grass-grown ways were traveled but by drowsy cattle, that, less waked than stirred by day, seemed to walk in sleep.  Browse, they did not—­the enchanted never eat.  At least, so says Don Quixote, that sagest sage that ever lived.

On I went, and gained at last the fairy mountain’s base, but saw yet no fairy ring.  A pasture rose before me.  Letting down five mouldering bars—­so moistly green, they seemed fished up from some sunken wreck—­a wigged old Aries, long-visaged, and with crumpled horn, came snuffing up; and then, retreating, decorously led on along a milky-way of white-weed, past dim-clustering Pleiades and Hyades, of small forget-me-nots; and would have led me further still his astral path, but for golden flights of yellow-birds—­pilots, surely, to the golden window, to one side flying before me, from bush to bush, towards deep woods—­which woods themselves were luring—­and, somehow, lured, too, by their fence, banning a dark road, which, however dark, led up.  I pushed through; when Aries, renouncing me now for some lost soul, wheeled, and went his wiser way..  Forbidding and forbidden ground—­to him.