rbed again before that rain has fallen, but penetrated
throughout, whether it be vapor or whether it be dew, with soft
sunshine, turning it as white as snow. Gradually as it rises, the rainy
fusion ceases, you cannot tell where the film of blue on the left
begins--but it is deepening, deepening still,--and the cloud, with its
edge first invisible, then all but imaginary, then just felt when the
eye is _not_ fixed on it, and lost when it is, at last rises, keen from
excessive distance, but soft and mantling in its body, as a swan's bosom
fretted by faint wind, heaving fitfully against the delicate deep blue,
with white waves, whose forms are traced by the pale lines of opalescent
shadow, shade only because the light is within it, and not upon it, and
which break with their own swiftness into a driven line of level spray,
winnowed into threads by the wind, and flung before the following vapor
like those swift shafts of arrowy water which a great cataract shoots
into the air beside it, trying to find the earth. Beyond these, again,
rises a colossal mountain of gray cumulus, through whose shadowed sides
the sunbeams penetrate in dim, sloping, rain-like shafts; and over which
they fall in a broad burst of streaming light, sinking to the earth, and
showing through their own visible radiance the three successive ranges
of hills which connect its desolate plain with space. Above, the edgy
summit of the cumulus, broken into fragments, recedes into the sky,
which is peopled in its serenity with quiet multitudes of the white,
soft, silent cirrus; and under these again, drift near the zenith,
disturbed and impatient shadows of a darker spirit, seeking rest and
finding none.

Sec. 17. And in his Pools of Solomon.

Now this is nature! It is the exhaustless living energy with which the
universe is filled; and what will you set beside it of the works of
other men? Show me a single picture, in the whole compass of ancient
art, in which I can pass from cloud to cloud, from region to region,
from first to second and third heaven, as I can here, and you may talk
of Turner's want of truth. Turn to the Pools of Solomon, and walk
through the passages of mist as they melt on the one hand into those
stormy fragments of fiery cloud, or, on the other, into the cold
solitary shadows that compass the sweeping hill, and when you find an
inch without air and transparency, and a hairbreadth without
changefulness and thought; and when you can count