onger shadows
athwart the rocks; and out of the pale blue of the horizon you will see
forming and advancing a troop of narrow, dark, pointed vapors,[45] which
will cover the sky, inch by inch, with their gray network, and take the
light off the landscape with an eclipse which will stop the singing of
the birds and the motion of the leaves together; and then you will see
horizontal bars of black shadow forming under them, and lurid wreaths
create themselves, you know not how, along the shoulders of the hills;
you never see them form, but when you look back to a place which was
clear an instant ago, there is a cloud on it, hanging by the precipices,
as a hawk pauses over his prey.[46] Has Claude given this? And then you
will hear the sudden rush of the awakened wind, and you will see those
watch-towers of vapor swept away from their foundations, and waving
curtains of opaque rain let down to the valleys, swinging from the
burdened clouds in black, bending fringes,[47] or pacing in pale columns
along the lake level, grazing its surface into foam as they go. And
then, as the sun sinks, you shall see the storm drift for an instant
from on the hills, leaving their broad sides smoking, and loaded yet
with snow-white torn, steam-like rags of capricious vapor, now gone, now
gathered again;[48] while the smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but
burning like a red-hot ball beside you, and as if you could reach it,
plunges through the rushing wind and rolling cloud with headlong fall,
as if it meant to rise no more, dyeing all the air about it with
blood.[49] Has Claude given this? And then you shall hear the fainting
tempest die in the hollow of the night, and you shall see a green halo
kindling on the summit of the eastern hills,[50] brighter--brighter yet,
till the large white circle of the slow moon is lifted up among the
barred clouds,[51] step by step, line by line; star after star she
quenches with her kindling light, setting in their stead an army of
pale, penetrable, fleecy wreaths in the heaven, to give light upon the
earth, which move together, hand in hand, company by company, troop by
troop, so measured in their unity of motion, that the whole heaven seems
to roll with them, and the earth to reel under them. Ask Claude, or his
brethren, for that. And then wait yet for one hour until the east again
becomes purple,[52] and the heaving mountains, rolling against it in
darkness, like waves of a wild sea, are drowned one by