At first it is not all so different, as to let us see at once we are in no hallowed region. There is beauty, and color; but the beauty is neither from the sun nor from the moon, and the color from no dawn nor sunset, from no sky nor sea. Shifting mists may give place to a dazzling Moorish palace, or to a peasant's cottage inhabited by the dead. Mirth or sadness may lurk in such dwellings; but beware of any intimacy with them: you cannot tell what fair seeming masks the ghoul. There is no order nor established nature of things, nothing you can depend on. The fig grows on the thistle; but any hunger is better than to eat it; vines and figtrees are prolific of innumerable thorns. Gorgeous blooms prophesy only of doom and impending horror. That is, when you have journeyed some little while. At first, perhaps, they will tell no tale but of sweetness and fragrance for the senses. Luxurious poppies are on every roadside, haunted with night and dreams: but beware of the whitest lily, the deepest rose; besides these the poppies are but flower children innocent of guile. Very early on the way to this fairyland, you shall come to Xanadu, where Kublai Khan decreed his stately pleasure-dome. A beautiful place? Yes, but mark; here Alph, the sacred river runs "through _caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea_." There is much wonder in that; but also darkness, and--incipient terror. Your true and right-hand fairyland, "bards in fealty to Apollo hold." _It_ is all "in the Face of the Sun and the Eye of Light." For a lone reminder of better things, the forests of Xanadu do inclose sunny spots of greenery; but the heart of the place! It is "as holy and enchanted as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman _wailing for her demon lover_." Heavens! is that your mark of holiness? They do not so reckon it in the right fairyland, where the tragedies are effects flowing from causes. And the beauty of the place? "The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves":--a scintillant mirage, a sensuous unreal efflorescence of phantasmagoria; and midst it all, "ancestral voices prophesying war."