SUMMER CLOUDS 



FOR one who has lived so much among the 

 hills and loves the mountain solitude it may 

 seem strange to aver that the most uplifting 

 and enduring charm in Nature is to be found 

 in amplitude of space. Low and rolling lands 

 give what no highlands allow. If in these the 

 miraculous surprise of cloud is a perpetual new 

 element of loveliness, it is loveliness itself that 

 unfolds when an interminable land recedes from 

 an illimitable horizon, and, belonging to each 

 and yet remote from either, clouds hang like 

 flowers, or drift like medusae, or gather 

 mysteriously as white bergs in the pale azure 

 of arctic seas. 



We are apt to be deceived by the formal 

 grandeur of mountains, by the massed colours 

 and contours of upbuilded heights, whether 

 lying solitarily like vast sleeping saurians, or 

 gathered in harmonious, if tumultuous, disarray. 

 There is a beauty that is uniquely of the hills. 

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