f
foreign climes, far away among the regions of the North, where Nature
works her wonders aloof from human eyes, and that wild architect Frost,
during the absence of the sun, employs his night of months in building
and dissolving his ice-palaces, magnificent beyond the reach of any
power set to work at the bidding of earth's crowned and sceptred kings?
All at once a hundred houses, high up among the hills, seem on fire. The
setting sun has smitten them, and the snow-tracts are illuminated by
harmless conflagrations. Their windows are all lighted up by a lurid
splendour, in its strong suddenness sublime. But look, look we beseech
you, at the sun--the sunset--the sunset region--and all that kindred and
corresponding heaven, effulgent where a minute ago lay in its cold
glitter the blue bosom of the lake. Who knows the laws of light and the
perpetual miracle of their operation? God--not thou. The snow-mountains
are white no more, but gorgeous in their colouring as the clouds. Lo!
Pavey-Ark--magnificent range of cliffs--seeming to come forward, while
you gaze!--How it glows with a rosy light, as if a flush of flowers
decked the precipice in that delicate splendour! Langdale-Pikes,
methinks, are tinged with finest purple, and the thought of violets is
with us as we gaze on the tinted bosom of the mountains dearest to the
setting sun. But that long broad slip of orange-coloured sky is
yellowing with its reflection almost all the rest of our Alps--all but
yon stranger--the summit of some mountain belonging to another
region--ay--the Great Gabel--silent now as sleep--when last we clomb his
cliffs, thundering in the mists of all his cataracts. In his shroud he
stands pallid like a ghost. Beyond the reach of the setting sun he lours
in his exclusion from the rejoicing light, and imagination personifying
his solitary vastness into forsaken life, pities the doom of the forlorn
Giant. Ha! just as the eye of day is about to shut, one smile seems sent
afar to that lonesome mountain, and a crown of crimson encompasses his
forehead.

On which of the two sunsets art thou now gazing? Thou who art to our old
loving eyes so like the "mountain nymph, sweet Liberty?" On the sunset
in the heaven--or the sunset in the lake? The divine truth is--O
Daughter of our Age!--that both sunsets are but visions of our own
spirits. Again both are gone from the outward world--and nought remains
but a forbidding frown of the cold bleak snow. But imperishable