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The day was a true November day, dark and rainy and cold, and when I confronted my cloud-built city of domes and towers I was concerned only with a place to sleep I had little desire of battle and no remembrance of the Golden Fleece. Again I found my way through Haymarket Square to Tremont street and so at last to the Common, which presented a cold and dismal face at this time.
Meanwhile, through all nature's changes, through calm and tempest, rain and snow, through dull refusing winter, and the first passing visits of open-handed spring, the hearts of men were awaiting the outburst of the thunder, the blue peaks of whose cloud-built cells had long been visible on the horizon of the future.
Its gods were brutal giant forces, patrons of war, robbery, and drunken revelry; its heaven a vast cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriors drank from the skulls of their victims; its hell a frozen horror of desolation and darkness, all that the gloomy Northern imagination could superadd to the repulsive and frightful features of arctic scenery: volcanoes spouting fire through craters rimmed with perpetual frost, boiling caldrons flinging their fierce jets high into the air, and huge jokuls, or ice-mountains, loosened and upheaved by volcanic agencies, crawling slowly seaward, like misshapen monsters endowed with life, a region of misery unutterable, to be avoided only by diligence in robbery and courage in murder.
We encamped here under a grove of apricot and apple-trees, which resulted in the production of an apple-dumpling for dinner. Leaving Suspul, we ascended considerably to the village of Buzgo, another of the cloud-built little settlements so dear to the Lamas.
Hopelessly "sot" in all his eastern ways, he remained the doubter, the critic, all his life. Grandfather's church was a small white building in the edge of the village, Grandad's place of worship was a vision, a cloud-built temple, a house not made with hands. The contrast between my grandmothers was equally wide. Harriet Garland was tall and thin, with a dark and serious face.
Stocks went about his duty with praise-worthy thoroughness. For the fiftieth time in a week he detailed to her his prospects. When he had raised a cloud-built castle of fine hopes, when he had with manly simplicity repeated his confession of faith, he felt that the crucial moment had arrived.
It was easier to go a-building among those dream-cities where no limitations were imposed, and one was sole architect, with a free hand. Down a delectable street of cloud-built palaces I was mentally pacing, when I happened upon the Artist. He was seated at work by the roadside, at a point whence the cool large spaces of the downs, juniper-studded, swept grandly westwards.
Meanwhile, through all nature's changes, through calm and tempest, rain and snow, through dull refusing winter, and the first passing visits of open-handed spring, the hearts of men were awaiting the outburst of the thunder, the blue peaks of whose cloud-built cells had long been visible on the horizon of the future.
The Arapahoes and Camanches of our day are no further removed from the sweetness and light of Christian culture than were the Scandinavian Sea Kings of the middle centuries, whose gods were patrons of rapine and cruelty, their heaven a vast, cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriors drank from the skulls of their victims, and whose hell was a frozen horror of desolation and darkness, to be avoided only by diligence in robbery and courage in murder.
A faith which is not solidly established in reason, which does not continue and complete in its own regions what we know and understand, is a cloud-built faith, but a faith, on the other hand, which refuses to adventure beyond the limits of the senses is a faith too largely empty of any noble content.
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