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We are forced to approach the historical period of Greece through a cloud-land of legend, in which atones of the gods are mingled with those of men, and the most marvellous of incidents are introduced as if they were everyday occurrences. The Argonautic expedition belongs to this age of myth, the vague vestibule of history.
"I think I understand what you mean; but to me everything is in cloud-land, vague and shifting, and the fact that nobody has ever attempted to put in writing these principles, or even to enumerate them, leads one to doubt whether really there are such things.
The authors of both alike set one main object before them to exalt the reigning princes by identifying them with the heroes or princes of an anterior epoch; only in the case of the Kavi poems, this anterior epoch is fixed in the cloud-land of Hindu mythology, while after the Mohammedan conquest it becomes merely the preceding era of the Hindu supremacy in Java, which is used as a ladder by which the Hindu cloud-land may be reached.
I was lying back in my study-chair, with my heels luxuriously propped on an ottoman, reading for the two-hundredth time Hawthorne's "Mosses from an Old Manse," or his "Twice-Told Tales," I forget which, I only know that these books constitute my cloud-land, where I love to sail away in dreamy quietude, forgetting the war, the price of coal and flour, the rates of exchange, and the rise and fall of gold.
His enthusiasm was at the bottom of all he did. He was well read in the belles lettres of England and the romanticists of France. These books were his bible. He was steeped in the stage-land and cloud-land of sentimental literature. From time to time, he emerged, trailing clouds of glory and showering sparkles from his hands.
There are certain sights and sounds not to be caught by hurried observers, evanescent aspects of cloud-land and tree-land, rock and undergrowth, passing notes of bird and insect, varied melodies, if we may so express it, of summer breeze and autumn wind in fine, a dozen experiences enjoyed one day, not repeated on the next.
Whether it be wise or prudent, or even pleasant, to leave our island in the very height of its season, so to speak at a time when it is most lovely, when the sweet fresh green of the meadows is changing to bloom of harvest and gold of autumn for countries the features of which are harder, and the landscape, if bolder, certainly less beautiful, for a climate which, if more sunny, is certainly more bare and burnt up, and for skies which, if more blue, lack much of the poetry of cloud-land we will not stay to enquire; but admitting the fact that, for various reasons, English people will go abroad in the autumn, and that there is a fashion, we might almost say a passion, for 'flying, flying south, which seems irresistible we will endeavour in the following pages to suggest a compromise, in the shape of a tour which shall include the undoubted delight and charm of foreign travel, with scenery more like England than any other in Europe, which shall be within an easy distance from our shores, and within the limits of a short purse; and which should have one special attraction for us, viz., that the country to be seen and the people to be visited bear about them a certain English charm the men a manliness, and the women a beauty with which we may be proud to claim kindred.
How truly you describe the sense of dissatisfaction which every writer of superior genius communicates to his admirers! how truly do you feel that the greater is the dissatisfaction in proportion to the writer's genius, and the admirer's conception of it! But that is the mystery which makes let me borrow a German phrase the cloud-land between the finite and the infinite.
Let me expound these five "heads" in order. On my left rose the woody slopes and crags of the Zuurberg, above whose summits the white hills and towers and gorgeous battlements of cloud-land rose into the bright blue sky.
Flowers also attracted him by their perfume. But what he loved in nature was essentially its prefiguring of human existence, or its echo of it; and it never appeared, in either his works or his conversation, that he was much impressed by its inanimate forms by even those larger phenomena of mountain and cloud-land on which the latter dwells.
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