the shoulders of the hills; you never see them
form, but when you look back to a place which was clear an instant
ago, there is a cloud on it, hanging by the precipice, as a hawk
pauses over his prey;--and then you will hear the sudden rush of the
awakened wind, and you will see those watch-towers of vapour swept
away from their foundations, and waving curtains of opaque rain, let
down to the valley, swinging from the burdened clouds in black bending
fringes, or, pacing in pale columns along the lake level, grazing its
surface into foam as they go. And then, as the sun sinks, you shall
see the storm drift for an instant from off the hills, leaving their
broad sides smoking and loaded yet with snow-white, torn, steam-like
rags of capricious vapour, now gone, now gathered again,--while the
smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball
beside you, and as if you could reach it, plunges through the rushing
wind and rolling cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant to rise no
more, dyeing all the air about it with blood;--and then you shall hear
the fainting tempest die in the hollow of the night, and you shall see
a green halo kindling on the summit of the eastern hills, brighter,
brighter yet, till the large white circle of the slow moon is lifted
up among the barred clouds, step by step, line by line; star after
star she quenches with her kindling light, setting in their stead an
army of pale, penetrable, fleecy wreaths in the heaven, to give light
upon the earth, which move together hand in hand, company by company,
troop by troop, so measured in their unity of motion that the whole
heaven seems to roll with them, and the earth to reel under them. And
then wait yet for one hour, until the east again becomes purple, and
the heaving mountains, rolling against it in darkness, like waves of a
wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of its burning; watch
the white glaciers blaze in their winding paths about the mountains,
like mighty serpents with scales of fire; watch the columnar peaks of
solitary snow, kindling downwards chasm by chasm, each in itself a new
morning--their long avalanches cast down in keen streams brighter than
the lightning, sending each his tribute of driven snow, like
altar-smoke, up to heaven; the rose-light of their silent domes
flushing that heaven about them, and above them, piercing with purer
light through its purple lines of lifted cloud, casting a new glory on
every w