Not a flame nor a jet was anywhere visible. Tinted vases, pendent, or resting upon pedestals, distributed harmonies and thoughts of light rather than light itself; and yet all was visible, effulgent. The columns which separated the apartments seemed to be composed of masses of richly-colored flames, compelled, by some ingenious alchemy, to assume the form and office of columns. In New York, _par excellence_ the city of private gorgeousness and _petite_ magnificence, nothing had yet been seen equal to the rooms of the glorious Denslow Palace. Even Dalton, the most capricious and critical of men, whose nice vision had absorbed the elegancies of European taste, pronounced them superb. The upholstery and ornamentation were composed under the direction of celebrated artists. Palmer was consulted on the marbles. Page (at Rome) advised the cartoons for the frescoes, and gave laws for the colors and disposition of the draperies. The paintings, panelled in the walls, were modern, triumphs of the art and genius of the New World. Until the hour for dancing, prolonged melodies of themes modulated in the happiest moments of the great composers floated in the perfumed air from a company of unseen musicians, while the guests moved through the vast apartments, charmed or exalted by their splendor, or conversed in groups, every voice subdued and intelligent. At midnight began the modish music of the dance, and groups of beautiful girls moved like the atoms of Chladni on the vibrating crystal, with their partners, to the sound of harps and violins, in pleasing figures or inebriating spirals. When supper was served, the ivory fronts of a cabinet of gems divided itself in the centre,--the two halves revolving upon silver hinges,--and discovered a hall of great height and dimensions, walled with crimson damask, supporting pictures of all the masters of modern art. The dome- like roof of this hall was of marble variously colored, and the floor tessellated and mosaicked in grotesque and graceful figures of Vesuvian lavas and painted porcelain. The tables, couches, chairs, and _vis-a-vis_ in this hall were of plain pattern and neutral dead colors, not to overpower or fade the pictures on the walls, or the gold and Parian service of the cedar tables. But the chief beauty of this unequalled supper-room was an immense bronze candelabrum, which rose in the centre from a column of black marble. It was the figure of an Italian elm, slender and of thin foliage, embraced, almost enveloped, in a vine, which reached out and supported itself in hanging from all the branches; the twigs bearing fruit, not of grapes, but of a hundred little spheres of crimson, violet, and golden light, whose combination produced a soft atmosphere of no certain color.