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William Blake proposed to rebuild Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land. My lord proposed to erect a miniature Babylon amid similar pleasant surroundings, a little dream-city by the sea, a home for the innocent pleasure-seeker stifled by the puritanism of the great towns, refugium peccatorum in this island of the saints.
On the third evening, we left this dream-city by a means which we had studiously ignored all the time of our visit namely, a railway, which crosses from Venice to the mainland.
The sun beats upon the shelterless town until it becomes a great cauldron within its amphitheatre of hills. During the Greater Pilgrimage the cauldron seethes with heat and humanity, and surges over into Mina and Arafat. In the daytime Mecca is limitless heat and noise, but under the stars it has all the magic of a dream-city in a country of wide horizons.
When he approached, the old man looked up and smiled, giving him a silent, expressively courteous morning greeting, by his manner it was evident that he thought his guest had merely been out for an early stroll ere the heat of the day set in. And yet Al-Kyris! ... How real had seemed that dream- existence in that dream-city!
"It seems, my dear," said I, "that we have got to Nephelococcygia after all." "What is Nephelococcygia?" asked Carlotta. I relented. "It's a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city," said I. Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness; out of horror has sprung an everlasting love.
When he came into the open air and mounted, it was not yet sunrise, and in that spectral early light, which is all Egypt's own, Cairo looked like some dream-city in a forgotten world.
But somehow it was not his Jerusalem scarce more than his London Ghetto transplanted, only grown filthier and narrower and more ragged, with cripples for beggars and lepers in lieu of hawkers. The magic of his dream-city was not here. This was something prosaic, almost sordid. It made his heart sink as he thought of the sacred splendors of the Zion he had imaged in his suffering soul.
Her head buzzed continuously and she could hardly sleep, and she was glad when one afternoon they took her into the country again the Bluegrass country and to the little town near which Hale had been born, and which was a dream-city to June, and to a school of which an old friend of his mother was principal, and in which Helen herself was a temporary teacher. And Rumour had gone ahead of June.
From Florence, Nevin went to Venice, where he lived in an old casa on the Grand Canal, opposite the Browning palazzo, and near the house where Wagner wrote "Tristan und Isolde." One day his man, Guido, took a day off, and brought to Venice an Italian sweetheart, who had lived a few miles from the old dream-city and had never visited it.
To be refused admission as a rogue and a vagabond, to be rejected of his fellow-Jews, to be hustled out of his dream-city by the overseer of the Jewish gate-house! Woe! Woe! Was this to be the end of his long aspiration? A week ago he had been so happy.
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