olitary thought. What
clouds are gathering in the golden west with direful intent against
the brightness and the warmth of this summer afternoon? They are
ponderous air-ships, black as death and freighted with the tempest,
and at intervals their thunder--the signal-guns of that unearthly
squadron--rolls distant along the deep of heaven. These nearer heaps
of fleecy vapor--methinks I could roll and toss upon them the whole
day long--seem scattered here and there for the repose of tired
pilgrims through the sky. Perhaps--for who can tell?--beautiful
spirits are disporting themselves there, and will bless my mortal eye
with the brief appearance of their curly locks of golden light and
laughing faces fair and faint as the people of a rosy dream. Or where
the floating mass so imperfectly obstructs the color of the firmament
a slender foot and fairy limb resting too heavily upon the frail
support may be thrust through and suddenly withdrawn, while longing
fancy follows them in vain. Yonder, again, is an airy archipelago
where the sunbeams love to linger in their journeyings through space.
Every one of those little clouds has been dipped and steeped in
radiance which the slightest pressure might disengage in silvery
profusion like water wrung from a sea-maid's hair. Bright they are as
a young man's visions, and, like them, would be realized in dullness,
obscurity and tears. I will look on them no more.

In three parts of the visible circle whose centre is this spire I
discern cultivated fields, villages, white country-seats, the waving
lines of rivulets, little placid lakes, and here and there a rising
ground that would fain be termed a hill. On the fourth side is the
sea, stretching away toward a viewless boundary, blue and calm except
where the passing anger of a shadow flits across its surface and is
gone. Hitherward a broad inlet penetrates far into the land; on the
verge of the harbor formed by its extremity is a town, and over it am
I, a watchman, all-heeding and unheeded. Oh that the multitude of
chimneys could speak, like those of Madrid, and betray in smoky
whispers the secrets of all who since their first foundation have
assembled at the hearths within! Oh that the Limping Devil of Le Sage
would perch beside me here, extend his wand over this contiguity of
roofs, uncover every chamber and make me familiar with their
inhabitants! The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a
spiritualized Paul Pry hovering