vital power of the sun is modified by the humidity of the air which it has called up during the day, and which tinges the celestial blue with dark azure, fills the heavens with delicate crimson and roseate tints, and turns the sky into gleaming gold. Solar fires are reflected upon the surface of the agitated waters, and all the west is red with slain sunlight.
The setting sun is almost always accompanied by clouds, which, owing to the curvature of the earth, though seemingly touching the water's edge, may be two miles above the ocean; they are formed sometimes of ice and snow, and serve as specula in the display of those prismatic colors which illumine them as they wreathe themselves into innumerable grotesque pictures of mountains, animals, cities, and every form of imagery of which the mind is capable of conceiving. Ranged in the direction of the wind, in parallel graduating series one above another, they sometimes overspread the whole azure background from horizon to zenith, and draw themselves out in long strips far away toward the dim, leaden east, each rank increasing in brilliance toward the west. They heap themselves in huge billows of roseate vapor, or in mountains of sombre gray fringed with coppery crimson, and then go chasing one another with endless evolutions and transformations along their blazoned course. Breaking into detached masses, they assume various forms, a grand old temple, with arches and columns, from whose holy of holies flames the fiery orb as from the veiled shekinah, bathing the ocean in a. halo of glory; a castle crowning a rocky cliff, with turrets and battlements, with moat and walls and pennon-bearing tower; a magic city, with gardens, and palaces, and glittering domes and minarets; forms of cool, inviting groves, majestic forests, meadows, and grassy knolls; home scenes, the house, the barn, the table spread for tea, with the well-known forms of loved ones gathered round it; the fancy-pictured gold land, whither tends every thought, and of which all
