Gala-Days [63]
When you had looked long enough to dazzle and weary your eyes, a cloud would come and fold you about with opaqueness, and while you waited in the cloud, lo here! lo there! it flashed apart and shimmered yonder a blue sky, a brilliant landscape, and the distant level of the sea; or slowly its whiteness cleaved and rolled away, revealing a glorified mountain, a lake lying in the shadows, or the simple glen far down from which we came. It was constant change and ever-new delight.
But this going up mountains is a bad thing for the clouds. All their fleecy softness, all their pink and purple and pearly beauty, all the mystery of their unattainableness, is weighed in the balance and found to be fog, and by no means unapproachable. They will never impose upon us again. Never more will they ride through the serene blue, white-stoled cherubs of the sky. Henceforth there is very little sky about them. Sail away, little cloud, little swell, little humbug. Make believe you are away up in the curves of the sky. Not one person in fifty will climb a mountain and find you out. But I have been there, and you are nothing but fog, of the earth, earthy. And when I sat in the cleft of a rock on the side of Mount Washington, every fibre dulled through with your icy moisture, I could with a good will have sent a sheriff to arrest you for obtaining love under false pretences. O you innocent, child-like cloud heaving with warmth and passion as we saw, but a gray little imp, cold at the heart, and malignant, and malignant, as we felt.
Felt it only when we did feel it, after all; for no sooner did it roll slowly away, and, ceasing to be a discomfort, turn into scenery, than all its olden witchery came back. I have had no more than a glimpse of the world from a mountain. The evening and the morning were the first day; and, till time shall be no more, the evening and the morning will be all that there is of the day, aesthetically considered. Yet at noon,--the most unfascinating hour,--and in the early afternoon, though you must needs fail of the twilight and its forerunners, there is an intensity of brilliance and an immensity of breadth, that, it seems to me, must be greater than if the view were broken up by light and shade. You are blinded with a flood of radiance, disturbed, or rather increased, by the flitting cloud-shadows. The mountains deepen in the distance, burning red in the glare of the sun, bristling with pines, mottled with the various tints of oak and maple relieving the soberer evergreens purpling on the slopes through a spiritual hazy glow, delicatest lavender, and pearl, where they lie scarcely pencilling distant horizon. The clouds come sailing over, flinging their shadows to the plains,--shadows wavering down the mountain-sides with an indescribable sweet tremulousness, scudding over the lower summits, pursued by some frolicsome gale which we do not see, or resting softly in the dells, whose throbbing soothes itself to stillness in the grateful shade. And still, midway between heaven and earth, snatched up from the turmoil of the one into the unspeakable calm of the other, a great peace and rest sink into our souls. All around lies the earth, shining and silent as the sky, rippling in little swells of light, breaking into luminous points, rising into shapely shafts, spreading in limpid, molten silver, and all bathed, transmuted, glorified, with ineffable light, and sacred with eternal silence.
A bubble of home-life adheres to this stern peak. Determination and perseverance have built two stone cottages, rough and squat, where you may, if you have no mercy, eat a fine dinner that has been wearily dragged over eight miles of hillocky, rutty roads, and up eight miles of mountain; and drink without any compunction clear, cold water that the clouds have distilled without any trouble, and the rocks have bottled up in excellent refrigerators and furnish at the shortest notice and on the most reasonable terms, except in very dry weather. Or if a drought drinks up the supply in the natural wells, there is
But this going up mountains is a bad thing for the clouds. All their fleecy softness, all their pink and purple and pearly beauty, all the mystery of their unattainableness, is weighed in the balance and found to be fog, and by no means unapproachable. They will never impose upon us again. Never more will they ride through the serene blue, white-stoled cherubs of the sky. Henceforth there is very little sky about them. Sail away, little cloud, little swell, little humbug. Make believe you are away up in the curves of the sky. Not one person in fifty will climb a mountain and find you out. But I have been there, and you are nothing but fog, of the earth, earthy. And when I sat in the cleft of a rock on the side of Mount Washington, every fibre dulled through with your icy moisture, I could with a good will have sent a sheriff to arrest you for obtaining love under false pretences. O you innocent, child-like cloud heaving with warmth and passion as we saw, but a gray little imp, cold at the heart, and malignant, and malignant, as we felt.
Felt it only when we did feel it, after all; for no sooner did it roll slowly away, and, ceasing to be a discomfort, turn into scenery, than all its olden witchery came back. I have had no more than a glimpse of the world from a mountain. The evening and the morning were the first day; and, till time shall be no more, the evening and the morning will be all that there is of the day, aesthetically considered. Yet at noon,--the most unfascinating hour,--and in the early afternoon, though you must needs fail of the twilight and its forerunners, there is an intensity of brilliance and an immensity of breadth, that, it seems to me, must be greater than if the view were broken up by light and shade. You are blinded with a flood of radiance, disturbed, or rather increased, by the flitting cloud-shadows. The mountains deepen in the distance, burning red in the glare of the sun, bristling with pines, mottled with the various tints of oak and maple relieving the soberer evergreens purpling on the slopes through a spiritual hazy glow, delicatest lavender, and pearl, where they lie scarcely pencilling distant horizon. The clouds come sailing over, flinging their shadows to the plains,--shadows wavering down the mountain-sides with an indescribable sweet tremulousness, scudding over the lower summits, pursued by some frolicsome gale which we do not see, or resting softly in the dells, whose throbbing soothes itself to stillness in the grateful shade. And still, midway between heaven and earth, snatched up from the turmoil of the one into the unspeakable calm of the other, a great peace and rest sink into our souls. All around lies the earth, shining and silent as the sky, rippling in little swells of light, breaking into luminous points, rising into shapely shafts, spreading in limpid, molten silver, and all bathed, transmuted, glorified, with ineffable light, and sacred with eternal silence.
A bubble of home-life adheres to this stern peak. Determination and perseverance have built two stone cottages, rough and squat, where you may, if you have no mercy, eat a fine dinner that has been wearily dragged over eight miles of hillocky, rutty roads, and up eight miles of mountain; and drink without any compunction clear, cold water that the clouds have distilled without any trouble, and the rocks have bottled up in excellent refrigerators and furnish at the shortest notice and on the most reasonable terms, except in very dry weather. Or if a drought drinks up the supply in the natural wells, there is