I am never weary of watching the play of these giant children of the earth. Sometimes a soft white cloud, so pure, so bright, sleeps, amidst open sunshine, nestled like an infant in the bosom of a green mountain. Sometimes the rising upcurling vapour will linger Just above the summit, and seem for a while an incense exhaling from this vast censer. Sometimes it will descend, and _drape_ the whole side of the hill as with a transparent veil. I have seen it sweep between me and the mountain like a sheeted ghost, tall as the mountain, till the strong daylight dissolved its thin substance, and it rose again in flakes to decorate the blue heavens. But oh, glorious above all! when on some brightest of days, the whole mass of whitest clouds gathers midway upon the snow-topped mountain. How magnificent then is that bright eminence seen above the cloud! How it seems rising upwards--how it seems borne aloft by those innumerable wings--by those enormous pinions which I see stretching from the cloudy mass! What an ascension have we here!--what a transfiguration! O Raphael! I will not disparage thy name nor thy art, but thy angels bearing on their wings the brightening saint to Heaven--what are they to the picture here? Look! there--fairly in the sky--where we should see but the pure ether--above the clouds which themselves are sailing high in serenest air--yes, there, in the blue and giddy expanse, stands the solid mountain, glittering like a diamond. O God! the bewildered reason pent up in cities, toils much to prove and penetrate thy being and thy nature--toils much in vain. Here, I reason not--I see. The Great King lives--lo there is his throne. * * * * * To him who quits the plain for the mountain, how the character of the cloud alters. That which seemed to belong exclusively to the sky, has been drawn down and belongs as plainly to the earth. Mount some noble eminence and look down--you will see the clouds lying _on_ and _about_ the landscape, as if they had fallen on it. You are on the steadfast earth, and they are underneath you. You look down perhaps on the lake, and there is a solitary cloud lying settled on it; when the rest of the fleecy drove had risen from their couch, this idle sleeper had been left dreaming there. Or stay below, and see the sun rise in the valley. When all is warm and clear upon the heights, and the tops of the hills are fervid with the beams of heaven, there still lies a cold white mass of cloud about your feet. It is not yet morning in the valley. There the cloud has been slumbering all night--there it found its home. It also will by and by receive the beam, and then it will arise, enveloping the hill as it ascends; the hill will have a second dawn; the cloud will assume its proud station in the sky; but it will return again to the valley at night.