penetrate yet into any one of the Fine Art
Courts into which this fairy crystal is
divided, but hurry up the very first staircase.
Pursue its geometrical windings up, and up
and up, till you can mount no further. Then
approach the railing of the topmost, endmost
gallery. Grasp the balustrade firmly;
suppress whatever sudden impulse may come
over you to turn giddy, to faint away, or to
throw yourself headlong from the gallery.
Set your lips firm, and look straight ahead—
along the glorious length and breadth of the
nave of the Crystal Palace. Messrs. Aladdin,
Vathek, and Company, built very magnificent
palaces in their time; but this one is
immeasurably beyond them. Castles of steel,
brass, cedar, adamant, amber, and chalcedony
hide your diminished heads! Grand Cairo,
Stamboul, Bagdad, Ispahan, Tyre, Sidon,
Rhodes, Nineveh, you possessed—all of you
—some very magnificent structures; your
architectural glories will last as long as
human knowledge, yet this thought never
struck you. You never could combine
magnificence, strength, lightness, space, perspective,
colour, out of glass and iron, deal boards and
zinc louvres. Your fairies were clumsy architects
compared with the great magician of
the lily. "Not a frieze, nor a pediment, nor a
portico," sighs Vitruvius. "Not a single
Corinthian pilaster or a Doric entablature,"
grumbles Palladio. "Where are the Parian
marbles, the mahogany, the carving, the gilding,
and the enriched mouldings?" roars
Orlando Gibbins. "It's very nice and very
pretty, but it's only a perpetual repetition of
a column, a girder, a truss, a gallery, a
window, and a ridge-and-furrow roof." "Of
course," answers Cosmos Murchison, "could
it be otherwise? Isn't it a crystal? and isn't
a crystal an agglomeration of identical forms.
Split a crystal, and will not the fractures be
precisely of the same shape as the parent
piece?" It is this very Fairy-like repetition,
this geometrical painting, if I may call it so,
that constitutes, in my mind, the chiefest
beauty of Crystal Fairy-land. The repetition
of girder and gallery and column; the
multifarious intersections of shaft and girder,
quadrangle following quadrangle, nave and aisles,
transept and wings, courts and galleries
interlacing, intercepting, in such admirably
regular irregularity—in such rigid yet fan
ciful perspective; all, when taken singly,
patterns of sublimity; all, when combined
into a whole, a grand spectacle of artistic
contrivance, which has left the mark of the
modern magician's wand.

Gaze yet your fill up and down this
glorious nave. Can you have any doubt of this
being Fairyland? Look at that huge female
head in the far, far distance. That only
marks the centre of the nave. Gaze at the
working fairies below, tinkling and hammering,
and the Palace growing, it would seem,
visibly beneath their fingers. They seem few
and far between, these working fairies, yet
there are four thousand of them employed
about Fairyland. You come on them
unawares—a nail is being driven here, a rivet
fastened, a sash fitted there; but from
the gallery the nave looks a vast solitude.
It being a fairy palace, the visitors and
the workmen are swallowed up in its
immensity.

Very wonderful is the mixture of familiar
things with those that in their grandeur
approach the sublime. The hall of the Fairy
Palace is strangely strewn with tools and
fragments of planking and old ropes. We
look above, and the eye wanders through
maze after maze of bright but harmonious
colours. We look below, and the eye fills on
brick pits (like neat family graves), being
built for stoves, or for the reservoirs of
fountains; on yawning caverns, disclosing neat
arrays of anything but supernatural gas and
water pipes; on mounds of bricks (some
thousands in each doubtless), which look from the
lofty gallery no bigger than dust heaps; and,
stranger than all, in the midst of all this
finished and unfinished beauty, the dusky
fairies sprinkle themselves about in their
fustian and corduroy.

Descend. Down, and down, and down, we
follow the windings of the corkscrew staircase;
iron, as what is not that is to be strong
in this wonderful place? We are on the
ground floor. Glancing, above, straightway
we see a giddy scaffolding and a forest of
poles, and columns, and girders, the skeleton
of another wing of the Fairy Palace yet
unglazed and incomplete. And without too,
through the transparent walls we see towering
high, a gigantic elaboration of our
acquaintance the corkscrew staircase, winding
up and up, and hugging, like a serpent, a
lofty campanile. This is to be the enchanted
tower of the Fairy Palace, which is to give
water power to those grand fountains which
are to laugh the vaunted grandes eaux of
Versailles to scorn, and cause the statue of
the grand monarque to hide his diminished
wig. Passing yet along, elbowed by sheds,
plankings, travelling paint-pots, locomotive
steam engines, poles and ladders, we see
too, another scaffolding, and passing it we
shudder, and think of the scaifolding that
fell the other day; when all the wisdom of
the magician, and all the subtlety of the
contractors could avail nothing against the stern
will of the demon Gravity.

We pass a fustian fairy who is deliberately
cutting bread and cheese with a very
unfairy-like knife, and we are in Egypt.
In Egypt. Here is Rameses, and here are
all his dynasties. Here is the god Anubis.
Here Isis, cat, dog, crocodile, and cow
divinities; hieroglyphics, sarcophagi, strange
doorways with winged summits, beetling
massive columns with palm tree capitals.
Where are the priests of Isis, to feed the
sacred crocodiles upon cakes of flour and
honey? Where is old Herodotus, to sit upon