effects of daylight on ordinary colours, and we
repeat again that no gorgeousness of the pallet can reach even these.
But it is a widely different thing when Nature herself takes a colouring
fit, and does something extraordinary, something really to exhibit her
power. She has a thousand ways and means of rising above herself, but
incomparably the noblest manifestations of her capability of colour are
in these sunsets among the high clouds. I speak especially of the moment
before the sun sinks, when his light turns pure rose-colour, and when
this light falls upon a zenith covered with countless cloud-forms of
inconceivable delicacy, threads and flakes of vapour, which would in
common daylight be pure snow-white, and which give, therefore, fair
field to the tone of light. There is, then, no limit to the multitude,
and no check to the intensity, of the hues assumed. The whole sky from
the zenith to the horizon becomes one molten mantling sea of colour and
fire; every black bar turns into massy gold, every ripple and wave into
unsullied shadowless crimson, and purple, and scarlet, and colours for
which there are no words in language, and no ideas in the mind--things
which can only be conceived while they are visible; the intense hollow
blue of the upper sky melting through it all, showing here deep, and
pure, and lightless; there, modulated by the filmy formless body of the
transparent vapour, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson and
gold. The concurrence of circumstances necessary to produce the sunsets
of which I speak does not take place above five or six times in a
summer, and then only for a space of from five to ten minutes, just as
the sun reaches the horizon. Considering how seldom people think of
looking for a sunset at all, and how seldom, if they do, they are in a
position from which it can be fully seen, the chances that their
attention should be awake, and their position favourable, during these
few flying instants of the year, are almost as nothing. What can the
citizen, who can see only the red light on the canvas of the wagon at
the end of the street, and the crimson colour of the bricks of his
neighbour's chimney, know of the flood of fire which deluges the sky
from the horizon to the zenith? What can even the quiet inhabitant of
the English lowlands, whose scene for the manifestation of the fire of
heaven is limited to the tops of hayricks, and the rooks' nests in the
old elm trees, know of the migh