ing.

It was on the crest of Monte Generoso, late one afternoon in May, that
we saw a sight of great beauty. The sun had yet about an hour before
it sank behind the peaks of Monte Rosa, and the sky was clear, except
for a few white clouds that floated across the plain of Lombardy. Then
as we sat upon the crags, tufted with soldanellas and auriculas,
we could see a fleecy vapour gliding upward from the hollows of the
mountain, very thin and pale, yet dense enough to blot the landscape
to the south and east from sight. It rose with an imperceptible
motion, as the Oceanides might have soared from the sea to comfort
Prometheus in the tragedy of AEschylus. Already the sun had touched its
upper edge with gold, and we were expecting to be enveloped in a mist;
when suddenly upon the outspread sheet before us there appeared two
forms, larger than life, yet not gigantic, surrounded with haloes of
such tempered iridescence as the moon half hidden by a summer cloud is
wont to make. They were the glorified figures of ourselves; and what
we did, the phantoms mocked, rising or bowing, or spreading wide their
arms. Some scarce-felt breeze prevented the vapour from passing across
the ridge to westward, though it still rose from beneath, and kept
fading away into thin air above our heads. Therefore the vision lasted
as long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images with
their aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist.
I could not but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphic
Deity--'the Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mists
of the Non-ego.' Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made in
the image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages of
the world, gods dowered with like passions to those of the races
who have crouched before them, gods cruel and malignant and lustful,
jealous and noble and just, radiant or gloomy, the counterparts of men
upon a vast and shadowy scale. But here another question rose. If
the gods that men have made and ignorantly worshipped be really
but glorified copies of their own souls, where is the sun in this
parallel? Without the sun's rays the mists of Monte Generoso could
have shown, no shadowy forms. Without some other power than the mind
of man, could men have fashioned for themselves those ideals that they
named their gods? Unseen by Greek, or Norseman, or Hindoo, the potent
force by which alone they could externalise their image,