CLIMATE, EVIL BEASTS, SCENERY 129 



with suspended breath, and even as we watch 

 the glory passes. Already the mountains' 

 feet are dimmed. The veil creeps up and 

 up. All is indeed over. Night has come. 



And these sunsets ! But why write of 

 them ? Is not their splendour common to 

 this whole land, wherever the wide and 

 wonderful American sky prevaileth ? In its 

 purity, in its lustre, above all, in its height, 

 its peer is hardly to be found. For this is 

 no ' azure vault,' besung and belauded of the 

 conventional poet ; it is a vast immensity, in 

 which the eye loses itself and the soul mounts 

 secure, on whose lower altars the sunlit days 

 are heaped nightly, and whose sacrificial fires 

 are a spectacle for gods and men. 



But here, and once more. We rise in the 

 night watches, slumber hard to be entreated, 

 and look forth on the changeful moonlit spaces 

 overswept by the wide-winged shadows of 

 the wind-clouds, stealthy visitants from the 

 Great Unknown. Silence reigns but for 

 the rarely hushed sigh and murmur of the 

 Southern summer night ; then of a sudden, 

 rushing fearlessly into the stillness and the 

 silence, ring out the exultant notes of the 



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