Felt it only when we did feel it, after all; for no sooner did it roll slowly away, and, ceasing to be a discomfort, turn into scenery, than all its olden witchery came back. I have had no more than a glimpse of the world from a mountain. The evening and the morning were the first day; and, till time shall be no more, the evening and the morning will be all that there is of the day, aesthetically considered. Yet at noon,--the most unfascinating hour,--and in the early afternoon, though you must needs fail of the twilight and its forerunners, there is an intensity of brilliance and an immensity of breadth, that, it seems to me, must be greater than if the view were broken up by light and shade. You are blinded with a flood of radiance, disturbed, or rather increased, by the flitting cloud-shadows. The mountains deepen in the distance, burning red in the glare of the sun, bristling with pines, mottled with the various tints of oak and maple relieving the soberer evergreens purpling on the slopes through a spiritual hazy glow, delicatest lavender, and pearl, where they lie scarcely pencilling distant horizon. The clouds come sailing over, flinging their shadows to the plains,--shadows wavering down the mountain-sides with an indescribable sweet tremulousness, scudding over the lower summits, pursued by some frolicsome gale which we do not see, or resting softly in the dells, whose throbbing soothes itself to stillness in the grateful shade. And still, midway between heaven and earth, snatched up from the turmoil of the one into the unspeakable calm of the other, a great peace and rest sink into our souls. All around lies the earth, shining and silent as the sky, rippling in little swells of light, breaking into luminous points, rising into shapely shafts, spreading in limpid, molten silver, and all bathed, transmuted, glorified, with ineffable light, and sacred with eternal silence.