Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/342

 horizon a symmetry, enticing depth, weird masses, and a lonely top. We try to recognize the distinctions of this grand object which has been lifted there for ever to attract the curiosity of men. It is too remote to be minutely pictured: the shadows that apprise us of its deep seclusion veil the openings of paths by which it is to be explored. Stretches of a livelier color report to us the verdure and perfume of youth: the clouds that fling their pensive intervals upon it pass off pursued by gladness. But we perceive whole tracts that slope inwardly to sombreness where the fancy is interrupted by awe and vague surmise. Whither will those rifts lead us? Into what places visited by nothing human, whence we hurriedly return, looking back with a sense of some invisible pursuit, as if the forest shuddered with an adjuration which overtook, beneath the ground, our feet? What various latitudes are repeated along that height, with a zone for every season! It is shaped by all the weathers of the year: it groups within itself the smiles, the terrors, the fitful moods of Nature, and puts them into a distance of sublime effect.

While we are observing it, there grows thither, as if deposited out of the day, a softening tint; one hardly knows if it be light, or color, or a vapor, or how it be compounded of them all. But it envelops the whole outline, and spills over into every opening, a gracious refinement, an investiture not easily described, a light touch of gentle qualities which decline to be quoted in the dry list of the appraiser. It is the tender lady, the maiden with the delicate bloom of love and the remote