to the royal honors of mountains — which cumber so many landscape backgrounds, and demand as much of the student as if he should be required to construct Hamlet from a ghost, the Tuileries from a tile, or Paradise from a pippin.
A canopy of the lofty rain-clouds of this region overhangs the central mountain. We have already observed their shadows; let us now analyze their substance, and note their effect.
Western winds sweeping the Pacific catch dew from the thickets of palm-islands, and foam from breakers on the reefs that shelter blue lagoons, scoop handfuls from the deeps, where sunlight strikes like bended lightning, and tear away the stormy crests of surges. And as the winds hasten on in their hot journey, they play with their treasures of coolness, and find that vapor is a ductile thing, and may be woven into transparent fabrics of clouds, light, fragile, strong, elastic, and with all the qualities of dew and foam, sunny water, and the lurid might of angry sea. Such cloud-wreaths the warm ocean winds hold ready to fling upon every frigid slope of the Andes. No one of these aerial elements is wanting to the clouds over Mr. Church’s majestic Cordillera. They have the shimmer of dew, and the bulk of the surge; they are light as a garland, yet solid to resist a gale. Flexible sunbeams can penetrate this texture, and twine themselves with every fibre, and yet bluff winds cannot shatter them. Brightness and darkness flow and fuse together among their rims and contours.
