Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice Meynell,
perhaps? George Meredith? Shelley, who was "gold-dusty with tumbling
amongst the stars?" Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The heavenly hills of
Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. said it better--"The
travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how much is still to be said of
those piled-up mysteries of heaven!
We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to Stroudsburg.
That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is just as lovely as the
English Avon, but how much more likely we are to praise the latter!)
converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, drawing the foam of many a
mountain creek down through that matchless passway. Over the hills which
tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds,
hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height
of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of
golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in
ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite,
reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his
speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating moisture
clothes itself!
Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the highways
of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their miracles of
form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the stockades of earth had
fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant cliff, the spires of the
Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood one has dreamed of scaling the
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
knows?