its fierce and pitiless extremes of
temperature, will never give the lush meadows and lawns of moist
England, yet in the splendid and fiery lustres of its autumn forests,
in its gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and in the wild beauty of its
hills and mountains there is that which makes an English Midland
landscape seem tame in comparison. The rapid changes of temperature in
summer and the sudden rising of vast masses of heated air produce
cloud-structures of the most imposing description, especially huge,
irregular cumulus clouds that float in equilibrium above us like
colossal icebergs, airy mountain-ranges or tottering battlemented
towers and "looming bastions fringed with fire."

Yon clouds are big with flame, and not with rain,
Massed on the marvellous heaven in splendid pyres,
Whereon ethereal genii, half in pain
And half in triumph, light their mystic fires.

The brilliant deep-blue Italian skies of the Middle and Southern States
are full of poetry, and will repay the most careful and prolonged
study. I have seen, far up in the zenith, silvery fringes of cirrus
clouds forming and melting away at the same moment and in the same
place, ethereal and evanescent as a dream, easel-studies of Nature.
Sometimes the clouds take the form of most airily-delicate brown crape,
"hatchelled" on the sky in minute lines and limnings. Now the sky looks
like a sweet silver-azure ceiling, the blue peeping here and there
through tender masses of silver frosting. The skies of the New England
coast States are filled, during a large part of spring, summer and
autumn, with a white and dreamy haze, and do not produce
cloud-phenomena on such an imposing scale as the more brilliant skies
of the interior. I shall never forget a vast and glowing sunset-scene I
once witnessed in the Ohio Valley. It lasted but a few moments, but
what a spectacle! The setting sun was throwing his golden light over
the intensely green earth, and suffusing the irregular masses of clouds
now with a tender rosy light and now with delicate saffron. All along
the eastern horizon extended a black-blue cloud-curtain of about twenty
degrees in height, across which played the zigzag gold of the
lightning. Overhead hung the gigantic ring of a complete rainbow (a
rare phenomenon), looking like the iridescent rim of some vast sun that
had shot from its orbit and was rapidly nearing our earth. In the north
the while slept the sweet blue sky in peace. What a phantas