The sunset is far more gorgeous; it often reaches grandeur. Let it be
a winter evening. A suggestion of storm has been playing threats. The
western hills have reached up their time-toughened arms and carried
the burnt-out lantern of day to bed, tucking him away in gold-lace
tapestry and rose-tinted down. Then the blue, black, and brown clouds
change quickly to purple, pink, and red by turns, and the opaline sky
itself forms a background for the dissolving community of interlacing
filaments of priceless filigree, till in time too full of interest to
compute by measure, the whole heavens are aflame with a riotous orgy
of color, a prodigality of shifting scene, making one think of the
descriptions essayed by the writer of the Apocalypse.
We think of Moses who wished to see God "face to face," but was told
he would be permitted to behold only the "dying away of his glory." No
wonder the man who was forty years in the wilderness before that grand
exode, and forty more through the unsurveyed deserts, was enabled to
write the majestic prose-poems that have lived unaltered through all
these thousands of critical years! He was in the region where
inspiration is dispensed with hands of infinite wealth. God is the
dispenser.