ss, and needed to be upheld. At other times the whole hill
stands enveloped in the cloud that has expanded to embrace and to
conceal it. No jealousy here. Each lives its own grand life under the
equal eye of heaven.

As you approach the mountains, it seems that the clouds begin already
to arrange themselves in bolder and more fantastic shapes. They have a
fellowship here. They built their mountains upon mountains--their
mountains which are as light as air--huge structures built at the
giddy suggestion of the passing breeze. Theirs is the wild liberty of
endless change, by which they compensate themselves for their thin and
fleeting existence, and seem to mock the stationary forms of their
stable brethren fast rooted to the earth. And how genially does the
sun pour his beam upon these twin grandeurs! For a moment they are
assimilated; his ray has permeated, has etherealized the solid
mountain, has fixed and defined the floating vapour. What now is the
one but a stationary cloud? what is the other but a risen
hill?--poised not in the air but in the flood of light.

I am never weary of watching the play of these giant children of the
earth. Sometimes a soft white cloud, so pure, so bright, sleeps,
amidst open sunshine, nestled like an infant in the bosom of a green
mountain. Sometimes the rising upcurling vapour will linger Just above
the summit, and seem for a while an incense exhaling from this vast
censer. Sometimes it will descend, and _drape_ the whole side of the
hill as with a transparent veil. I have seen it sweep between me and
the mountain like a sheeted ghost, tall as the mountain, till the
strong daylight dissolved its thin substance, and it rose again in
flakes to decorate the blue heavens. But oh, glorious above all! when
on some brightest of days, the whole mass of whitest clouds gathers
midway upon the snow-topped mountain. How magnificent then is that
bright eminence seen above the cloud! How it seems rising upwards--how
it seems borne aloft by those innumerable wings--by those enormous
pinions which I see stretching from the cloudy mass! What an ascension
have we here!--what a transfiguration! O Raphael! I will not disparage
thy name nor thy art, but thy angels bearing on their wings the
brightening saint to Heaven--what are they to the picture here?

Look! there--fairly in the sky--where we should see but the pure
ether--above the clouds which themselves are sailing high in serenest
air--yes, there, i