he serene heaven, like a
wild, bright, impossible dream, foundationless and inaccessible, their
very bases vanishing in the unsubstantial and mocking blue of the deep
lake below.[33]... Wait yet a little longer, and you shall see those
mists gather themselves into white towers, and stand like fortresses
along the promontories, massy and motionless, only piled with every
instant higher and higher into the sky, and casting longer shadows
athwart the rocks; and out of the pale blue of the horizon you will
see forming and advancing a troop of narrow, dark, pointed vapours,
which will cover the sky, inch by inch, with their grey network, and
take the light off the landscape with an eclipse which will stop the
singing of the birds and the motion of the leaves, together; and then
you will see horizontal bars of black shadow forming under them, and
lurid wreaths create themselves, you know not how, along 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 precipices, 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 valleys, 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, comp