Originally published Weird Tales, March 1927 
Basil Elton, like his father before him (and his grandfather before him) is a working man and like his father before him that work is keeping a lighthouse. Because Elton's aren't terribly ambitious types. They didn't take rebel stands either - just shared weird stories about the sea and distant exotic lands. Real exotic. Like complete fairy-tale-froot-loop exotic.
(Actually I've always thought it would be cool to be a lighthouse keeper. Just sit out there all night with a good book and the foghorn blowing and turn the thing on once in awhile. But we all know lighthouse keepers are all grizzled old salts with beards and I can't grow one to save my life, plus I'd miss out on friends, dates, etc so I guess it's not meant to be. Sigh)
(Plus I'd be up late at night waiting for a dinosaur to pop out of the ocean and knock the place down, y'know. Anyway I digress)
So Basil keeps the light house and spends his time dreaming (it isn't entirely clear if this is a day-dream (well it happens at night) or a nocturnal one) about a white ship piloted by a bearded man in robes that sails in when the moon is full. The cap'n invites Basil to board - which at first he declines but finally complies, (crossing the water on a bridge of moonbeams) and they sail off to explore a chain of islands not found in any atlas.
And oh the places they go, including a "green land" where "dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten", the city of Thalarion where demons (we're never told anything about them except they're "frightful") live, the "Land of Pleasures Unattained" which appears to be not so pleasurable (it "reeks of plague" - not entirely sure what plague reeks like but, okay). The whole time they're following an "azure celestial bird" which I guess is kinda like HPL's version of a dove.
Anyway they end of in Sona Nyl, "Land of Fancy" where Elton spends "many aeons" fancying. He hears of a place called "Cathuria" and just has to go there like now (I guess fancying had gotten dull) so he persuades ol' beard-and-robes to sail him out there, following the bird. Except know one actually knows where Cathuria is. But they sail west anyway - after all we all know The West is the Best, right? (Thanks Jim!) Anyway it all turns out to be a bad plan since they reach the edge of the world and fall off.
Just in time Basil starts awake and finds himself on the rocks outside the lighthouse, which he allowed to go out, and now a ship is crashing on the rocks big time. Later on he finds a dead azure bird and bit of ship debris, pure white. Poor Basil!
This is really early Lovecraft and it shows, since the whole thing is so sketchy its almost more like a summary of a story (with some evocative notes) than an actual story. It's completely Dunsany-derivative but Lovecraft does add his own peculiar note of melancholy to the thing. I think (pure spec here as I don't know that much about Dunsany as a person) that the big diff between Dunsany's fantasies and Lovecraft's attempts to imitate them is that Dunsany enjoyed playing with his worlds of imagination whereas at the time Lovecraft was doing his most Dunsany-dipped work, he was either undergoing or coming out of some kind of major depressive episode, and he really did want to leave the world he found so awful and run off to fairy-tale land. That kind of feeling completely permeates this story like you would believe. All in all its an interesting trifle with some sad subtext underneath.
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