As he
passed the mirror he saw that he was covered with royal ermine, and
that his head wore a wonderful crown of gold, set with none but red
stones: rubies and carbuncles and garnets, and others whose names he
could not tell, glowed gloriously around his head, like the
salamandrine essence of all the Christmas fires over the world. A
sceptre lay beside him--a rod of ebony, surmounted by a cone-shaped
diamond, which, cut in a hundred facets, flashed all the hues of the
rainbow, and threw coloured gleams on every side, that looked like
Shadows too, but more ethereal than those that bore him. Then the
Shadows rose gently to the window, passed through it, and sinking
slowing upon the field of outstretched snow, commenced an orderly
gliding rather than march along the frozen surface. They took it by
turns to bear the king, as they sped with the swiftness of thought, in
a straight line towards the north. The pole-star rose above their heads
with visible rapidity; for indeed they moved quite as fast as sad
thoughts, though not with all the speed of happy desires. England and
Scotland slid past the litter of the king of the Shadows. Over rivers
and lakes they skimmed and glided. They climbed the high mountains, and
crossed the valleys with a fearless bound; till they came to
John-o'-Groat's house and the Northern Sea. The sea was not frozen; for
all the stars shone as clear out of the deeps below as they shone out
of the deeps above; and as the bearers slid along the blue-gray
surface, with never a furrow in their track, so pure was the water
beneath that the king saw neither surface, bottom, nor substance to it,
and seemed to be gliding only through the blue sphere of heaven, with
the stars above him, and the stars below him, and between the stars and
him nothing but an emptiness, where, for the first time in his life,
his soul felt that it had room enough.
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