sunlight on this planet, which is rightly mine—­I can indeed no longer picture to myself, nor even credit, that such a state of things—­so fantastic, so far-fetched, so infinitely droll—­could have existed:  though, at bottom, I suppose, I know that it must have been really so.  Up to ten years ago, in fact, I used frequently to dream that there were others.  I would see them walk in the streets like ghosts, and be troubled, and start awake:  but never now could such a thing, I think, occur to me in sleep:  for the wildness of the circumstance would certainly strike my consciousness, and immediately I should know that the dream was a dream.  For now, at least, I am sole, I am lord.  The golden walls of this palace which I have built look down, enamoured of their reflection, into a lake of the choicest, purplest wine.

Not that I made it of wine because wine is rare; nor the walls of gold because gold is rare:  that would have been too childish:  but because I would match for beauty a human work with the works of those Others:  and because it happens, by some persistent freak of the earth, that precisely things most rare and costly are generally the most beautiful.

The vision of glorious loveliness which is this palace now risen before my eyes cannot be described by pen and paper, though there may be words in the lexicons of language which, if I sought for them with inspired wit for sixteen years, as I have built for sixteen years, might as vividly express my thought on paper, as the stones-of-gold, so grouped and built, express it to the eye:  but, failing such labours and skill, I suppose I could not give, if there were another man, and I tried to give, the faintest conception of its celestial charm.

It is a structure positively as clear as the sun, and as fair as the moon—­the sole great human work in the making of which no restraining thought of cost has played a part:  one of its steps alone being of more cost than all the temples, mosques and besestins, the palaces, pagodas and cathedrals, built between the ages of the Nimrods and the Napoleons.

The house itself is very small—­only 40 ft. long, by 35 broad, by 27 high:  yet the structure as a whole is sufficiently enormous, high uplifted:  the rest of the bulk being occupied by the platform, on which the house stands, each side of this measuring at its base 480 ft., its height from top to bottom 130 ft, and its top 48 ft. square, the elevation of the steps being just nearly 30 degrees, and the top reached from each of the four points of the compass by 183 low long steps, very massively overlaid with smooth molten gold—­not forming a continuous flight, but broken into threes and fives, sixes and nines, with landings between the series, these from the top looking like a great terraced parterre of gold.  It is thus an Assyrian palace in scheme:  only that the platform has steps on all sides, instead of on one.  The platform-top, from its edge to