bulwarks of the clouds, of riding the ether on those strange galleons.
Unconscious of their own beauty, they pass in dissolving shapes--now
scudding on that waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage
way. If one could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what
abysses would meet the eye! What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of
the sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in pale
and awful spirals. Floating flat like ice floes beneath the greenish
moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming solidness on a
sunny morning--are they not the most superbly heart-easing miracles of
our visible world? Watch them as they shimmer down toward the Water Gap
in every shade of silver and rose and opal; or delicately tinged with
amber when they have caught some jewelled chain of lightning and are
suffused with its lurid sparkle. Man has worshipped sticks and stones
and stars: has he never bent a knee to the high gods of the clouds?

There they wander, the unfettered spirits of bliss or doom. Holding
within their billowed masses the healing punishments of the rain,
chaliced beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and unbearable as
the face of God--dissolving into a crystal nothing, reborn from the
viewless caverns of air--here let us erect one enraptured altar to the
bright mountains of the sky!

At sunset we were climbing back among the wooded hills of Pike County,
fifteen hundred feet above the salt. One great castle of clouds that had
long drawn our eyes was crowning some invisible airy summit far above
us. As the sun dipped it grew gray, soft, and pallid. And then one last
banner of rosy light beaconed over its highest turret--a final flare of
glory to signal curfew to all the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in
the shadow of dusk.

We thought that was the end. But no--a little later, after we had
reached the farm, we saw that the elfs of cloudland were still at play.
Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sudden gush of pale blue
lightning. And while we watched, with hearts almost painfully sated by
beauty, through some leak the precious fire ran out; a great stalk of
pure and unspeakable brightness fled passionately to earth. This
happened again and again until the artery of fire was discharged. And
then, slowly, slowly, the stars began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our
cloud drifted gently away.

Where and in what strange new form did it greet the flush of dawn? Who