e glen far down from which we
came. It was constant change and ever-new delight.

But this going up mountains is a bad thing for the clouds. All their
fleecy softness, all their pink and purple and pearly beauty, all the
mystery of their unattainableness, is weighed in the balance and found
to be fog, and by no means unapproachable. They will never impose upon
us again. Never more will they ride through the serene blue,
white-stoled cherubs of the sky. Henceforth there is very little sky
about them. Sail away, little cloud, little swell, little humbug. Make
believe you are away up in the curves of the sky. Not one person in
fifty will climb a mountain and find you out. But I have been there,
and you are nothing but fog, of the earth, earthy. And when I sat in
the cleft of a rock on the side of Mount Washington, every fibre dulled
through with your icy moisture, I could with a good will have sent a
sheriff to arrest you for obtaining love under false pretences. O you
innocent, child-like cloud heaving with warmth and passion as we saw,
but a gray little imp, cold at the heart, and malignant, and malignant,
as we felt.

Felt it only when we did feel it, after all; for no sooner did it roll
slowly away, and, ceasing to be a discomfort, turn into scenery, than
all its olden witchery came back. I have had no more than a glimpse of
the world from a mountain. The evening and the morning were the first
day; and, till time shall be no more, the evening and the morning will
be all that there is of the day, aesthetically considered. Yet at
noon,--the most unfascinating hour,--and in the early afternoon, though
you must needs fail of the twilight and its forerunners, there is an
intensity of brilliance and an immensity of breadth, that, it seems to
me, must be greater than if the view were broken up by light and shade.
You are blinded with a flood of radiance, disturbed, or rather
increased, by the flitting cloud-shadows. The mountains deepen in the
distance, burning red in the glare of the sun, bristling with pines,
mottled with the various tints of oak and maple relieving the soberer
evergreens purpling on the slopes through a spiritual hazy glow,
delicatest lavender, and pearl, where they lie scarcely pencilling
distant horizon. The clouds come sailing over, flinging their shadows
to the plains,--shadows wavering down the mountain-sides with an
indescribable sweet tremulousness, scudding over the lower summits,