pulling out bulging elephants and rocs and exaggerated humpy babies, and showing them to us and turning them into something different. My wife and I applaud him to the echo at such times, and would surely write letters to him thanking him for our entertainment, only we do not know his address. On cirrus days he is poetic, setting aloft filmy dreams in shell pink and pale gold, whose shapes the more ambitious kinds of birds have copied clumsily in their most delicate feathers, whose tints the more fragile sorts of flowers have tried to imitate in their petals. Earth, by gazing continually upwards and by striving her hardest to reproduce what she sees there, has succeeded in acquiring the beauty which we so much admire. The Alps, what are they but the expression of her desire to possess cumulus? And of a hot morning at Naples you may look over to Capri and see where she has almost achieved one of those soft blue mysteries which cost the Cloud Artist hardly a thought. And with what landscape can Earth rival his least-considered sunset display of purple plain and rosy hill and lake of molten gold?
I say nothing against the beauty of Earth. On the contrary, I spend a great deal of time here and elsewhere in extolling it. But I think that, being creatures of Earth, we push our admiration
