Then the traveler was right glad, and his heart was lifted up, and as he went he sang.  But, for all that, the way grew steeper to his feet, and the icy air colder to his face; and on every hand there were no longer meadows and orchards full of laboring folk, but glittering snow-wreaths, and diamond-bright glaciers, shining hard and keen against the deeps of darkening space; and at times the roar of a distant avalanche shook the atmosphere about him, and then died away into the silence out of which the sound had come.  Peak above peak of crystal-white mountain ranges rose upon his sight, massive, and still, and awful, terrible affirmations of the verity of the Ideal.  For this world of colossal heights and fathomless gulfs, of blinding snows, of primeval silence, of infinite revelation, of splendid lights upon manifold summits of opal, topaz, and sardony, all seemed to him the witness and visible manifestation of his most secret and dreadful thoughts.  He had seen these things in his visions, he had shaped them in his hidden reveries, he had dared to believe that such a region as this might be—­nay, ought to be—­ if the universe were of Divine making.  And now it burst upon him, an apocalypse of giant glories, an empire of absolute being, independent and careless of human presence, affirming itself eternally to its own immeasurable solitudes.

“I have reached the top and pinnacle of life,” cried the poet; “this is the world wherein all things are made!”

And now, indeed, save for the fairy bird, he trod his path alone.  Now and then great clouds of mist swept down from the heights, or rose from the icy gorges, and wrapped him in their soft gray folds, hiding from his sight the glittering expanse around him, and making him afraid.  Or, at times, he beheld his own shadow, a vast and portentous Self, projected on the nebulous air, and looming in his pathway, a solitary monster threatening him with doom.  Or yet again, there arose before him, multiplied in bewildering eddies of fog-wreath, a hundred spectral selves, each above and behind the other, like images repeated in reverberating mirrors—­his own form, his own mien, his own garb and aspect—­appalling in their omnipresence, maddening in their grotesque immensity as the goblins of a fever dream.  But when first the traveler beheld this sight, and shrank at it, feeling for his sword, the fairy bird at his breast sang to him, “Fear not, this is the Chimaera of whom the Princess spoke.  You have passed unhurt the sirens, the ogres, and the hydra-headed brood of plain and lowland; now meet with courage this phantom of the heights.  Even now thou standest on the confines of the land beyond the sunset; these are the dwellers on the border, the spectres who haunt the threshold of the farther world.  They are but shadows of thyself, reflections cast upon the mists of the abyss, phantoms painted on the veil of the sanctuary.  Out of the void they arise, the offspring of Unreason and of the Hadean Night.”