tenderly enfolds, and rests upon the mountain’s golden crown and silvery-shadowed heights. No blank wall thrusts us back as we seek an egress from the picture, but blue sky clinging and closing about our way leads us on, sphere after sphere into the infinite.
A few motionless cirri lie like wreaths of foam flung together by meeting ripples on this aerial ocean. Pellucid creatures of air are they, dwelling in mid ether from which they came and into which they will presently be transfigured after moments of brilliant incarnation. They seem emanations from the mountain, a film of its own substance, light snow-drifts whirled up into the blue. Their spiritual flakes lift the peak and intensify the hue of the sky. Their white upon the azure is as delicate as the mingling of erect white blossoms and violet-blue wreaths of flowers in the right-hand foreground, which in fact recalls and is a memorial of them. Of the other clouds I will speak as I come to their proper aerial region in the picture.
Next let our thoughts come down from these supernal regions, and pause “new-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.” A man becomes exalted to a demigod, more nobly divine than any of the Olympians, when he can soar to such a summit as this. An isolated snow-peak is the sublimest of material objects, and worthiest of daring Art, if Art but dare. Here it has dared and done.
This mountain is a type, not a portrait. If the
