These are the days of days, swathed in masses of lights and color unfathomable. It is one of the wonders of Washington too rarely noted—its sky-scenery. So few people take the trouble to look at the sky save to see if “it looks like rain.” All that New York can afford to give to tired mortals is a scanty slice of light through which to let a glimpse of glory down upon its palaces and catacombs of humanity. But across these banding hills, this broad amphitheatre of space, mass and sweep on, in the empyrean, wave on wave of polarized light, with a delicacy of tint, a depth of hue, an immensity of volume, which no words can portray. This vast sea of color (in its deeps of orange, purple and gold, which now transfigure the twilight sky, till the Virginia hills look like open gates to the city of gold) Professor Tyndall, in one of his lectures on light, in this city, said that he had never seen approached on the other side of the Atlantic, save by the intense refractions of light on the Alpine glaciers. In the autumnal days, and in the advancing spring, through the blue spaces steals a tremulous, ever hovering purple, like opaline doves’ necks’ lustre, penetrating all the atmosphere like the purple haze above the hills of Rome, till the yellow walls of Arlington House, and the snowy masses of the Capitol seem actually to shimmer through waves of amethystine mist. Under such a light, some morning, spring suddenly spreads forth its whole panoply, with a vividness of green, a prodigality of foliage never seen in a more northern latitude. One wide wilderness of unbroken bloom sends up its fragrance through waves of purple yellow and azure light, and then, till the day when, without warning, summer suddenly transmutes all into molten brass, Washington in light and color, in bloom and fragrance, is a city of enchantment.