"Who can understand his errors?" (wanderings from the perfect law.) "Cleanse thou me from secret faults; from all that I have done against thy will, and far from thy way, in the darkness. Keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins" (sins against the commandment) "against thy will when it is seen and direct, pleading with heart and conscience. So shall I be undefiled, and innocent from the great transgression--the transgression that crucifies afresh. "Let the words of my mouth (for I have set them to declare thy law), and the meditation of my heart (for I have set it to keep thy commandments), be acceptable in thy sight, whose glory is my strength, and whose work, my redemption; my Strength, and my Redeemer." FOOTNOTES: [1] Compare the beautiful stanza beginning the epilogue of the "Golden Legend." [2] I do not mean that Correggio is greater than Turner, but that only _his_ way of work, the touch which he has used for the golden hair of Antiope for instance, could have painted these clouds. In open lowland country I have never been able to come to any satisfactory conclusion about their height, so strangely do they blend with each other. Here, for instance, is the arrangement of an actual group of them. The space at A was deep, purest ultramarine blue, traversed by streaks of absolutely pure and perfect rose-color. The blue passed downwards imperceptibly into gray at G, and then into amber, and at the white edge below into gold. On this amber ground the streaks P were dark purple, and, finally, the spaces at B B, again, clearest and most precious blue, paler than that at A. The _two_ levels of these clouds are always very notable. After a continuance of fine weather among the Alps, the determined approach of rain is usually announced by a soft, unbroken film of level cloud, white and thin at the approaching edge, gray at the horizon, covering the whole sky from side to side, and advancing steadily from the south-west. Under its gray veil, as it approaches, are formed detached bars, darker or lighter than the field above, according to the position of the sun. These bars are usually of a very sharply elongated oval shape, something like fish. I habitually call them "fish clouds," and look upon them with much discomfort, if any excursions of interest have been planned within the next three days. Their oval shape is a perspective deception dependent on their flatness; they are probably thin, extended fields, irregularly circular. [Illustration: FIG. 98.] [3] I do not copy the interpolated words which follow, "and commandeth it _not to shine_." The closing verse of the chapter, as we have it, is unintelligible; not so in the Vulgate, the reading of which I give.