The divine
alpenglow flushes the surrounding forest every evening, followed by a
crystal night with hosts of lily stars, whose size and brilliancy cannot
be conceived by those who have never risen above the lowlands.
Thus come and go the bright sun-days of autumn, not a cloud in the sky,
week after week until near December. Then comes a sudden change. Clouds
of a peculiar aspect with a slow, crawling gait gather and grow in the
azure, throwing out satiny fringes, and becoming gradually darker until
every lake-like rift and opening is closed and the whole bent firmament
is obscured in equal structureless gloom. Then comes the snow, for the
clouds are ripe, the meadows of the sky are in bloom, and shed their
radiant blossoms like an orchard in the spring. Lightly, lightly they
lodge in the brown grasses and in the tasseled needles of the pines,
falling hour after hour, day after day, silently, lovingly,--all the
winds hushed,--glancing and circling hither, thither, glinting against
one another, rays interlocking in flakes as large as daisies; and then
the dry grasses, and the trees, and the stones are all equally abloom
again. Thunder-showers occur here during the summer months, and
impressive it is to watch the coming of the big transparent drops, each
a small world in itself,--one unbroken ocean without islands hurling
free through the air like planets through space.
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