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Updated: June 16, 2025
"These were the thoughts in my head as I climbed that monstrous inclined plane with the wind sometimes beating in my face and sometimes whistling behind my ears, while the cloud-land beneath me fell away to such a distance that the folds and hummocks of silver had all smoothed out into one flat, shining plain. But suddenly I had a horrible and unprecedented experience.
The cloister gives way to the open court; the inspired ones are seeking the roads which may lead out from hazy, unproven cloud-land into the brightness of the everyday, practical life which the world must have experience of, along all lines, among all classes, high and low, ignorant and learned, ere it can dislodge the incubus of superstition, and undevelopment under which it has staggered along, through devious ways of despair and unbelief, to awaken at last to a realization of the final destiny of humanity.
The great plain stretched away to the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of the fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the ambiguous cloud-land over the horizon.
It was like a day-dream to look at it; and the students ought to be day-dreamers, all of them, when cloud-land is one and the same thing with the substantial earth. By degrees all these clouds flitted away, and the sultry summer sun burned on hill and valley. As I was walking home, an old man came down the mountain-path behind me in a wagon, and gave me a drive to the village.
The vast parish-church, of sombre gray masonry, flashing carnival-fires from the tin-plated pepper-boxes and slopes of its acre of roof, is receiving or disgorging a variegated multitude of good Catholics. Within, it is a mass of foliage, a wilderness of shrines, a cloud-land of incense.
By gazing at the blue heavens, over which passed white clouds, ever-changing and of rare loveliness, the forest boy forgot the uncongenial scenes around him, the reality; and passing perforce of his imagination into the bright realm of cloud-land, was again on the hills, breathing the pure air, and following the deer.
Enimie, as yet invisible. Our journey must now be compared to the descent from cloud-land in a balloon. Meantime, the stupendous panorama of dark, superbly-outlined mountain-wall closes in. We seem to have reached the limit of the world.
There were signs, however, among the gorgeous beauties of this cloud-land, that were significant to eyes accustomed to read the face of the sky.
Old authors tell us that the Guanche whistle could be heard for two leagues, and an English traveller declares that after an experiment close to his ear he did not quite recover its use for a fortnight. The return home was wholly without interest, except the prospects of cloud-land, grander than those of Folkestone, which seemed to open another world beneath our feet.
Livingstone is ohne zweifel, a mythical form of the midnight sun, now fabled to wander in the "Dark Continent," as Bishop of Natal, the land of the sun's birthplace, now alluded to as lost in the cloud-land of comparative mythology. Of all these cobwebs spun by the spiders of sciolism, the Euhemeristic or Spencerian view that Gladstone is an historical personage has attracted most attention.
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