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Updated: June 16, 2025
I see him now, Afar in the sunny sky; He is floating back from Cloud-Land now, Borne by the fragrant air. Spread wide your leaves, that he may choose The flower he deems most fair." Then the wild rose glowed with a deeper blush, As she proudly waved on her stem; The Cowslip bent to the clear blue waves, And made her mirror of them.
The splendid ocean-mirror, which had reflected the golden crags and slopes, the towers and battlements of cloud-land, was shivered by a sudden breeze and became an opaque grey; the fair blue sky deepened to indigo; black and gathering clouds rose out of the horizon, and cold white crests gleamed on the darkening waves.
When my stocks in cloud-land rise, I'll build a cathedral larger than Milan's; and the men, but more particularly the women, thereon, shall be those who have done even more than Saint Paul tells of in the saints of old, who 'subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. I am not now thinking of Florence Nightingale, nor of the host of women who have been walking worthily in her footsteps, but of nameless saints of more retired and private state, domestic saints, who have tended children not their own through whooping-cough and measles, and borne the unruly whims of fretful invalids, stocking-darning, shirt-making saints, saints who wore no visible garment of haircloth, bound themselves with no belts of spikes and nails, yet in their inmost souls were marked and seared with the red cross of a lifelong self-sacrifice, saints for whom the mystical terms self-annihilation and self-crucifixion had a real and tangible meaning, all the stronger because their daily death was marked by no outward sign.
Various lurid and luminous clouds of grey and Indian-red hues told of approaching storm, and the men of Deal knew that the sea, which just then pictured every cloud in its glassy depths as clearly as if there had been another cloud-land below its surface, would, ere long, be ruffled with a stiffish breeze; perhaps be tossed by a heavy gale.
To be diverted to a certain degree may be well, but there is a point where earth ends and cloud-land begins, and even great poets occasionally befog the things they would reveal.
The enthusiast, who had passed away at last from the dreams of the Escorial into the land of shadows, had spent a lifetime, and melted the wealth of an empire; but universal monarchy had never come forth from his crucible. The French king, although possessed likewise of an almost boundless faculty for ambitious visions, was capable of distinguishing cloud-land from substantial empire.
He knew the past was once the present, and that if it seemed to be transformed and to rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the enchantment of distance an enchantment which men have been under in all ages. The everyday, the near-at-hand, become prosaic; there is no room for the alchemy of time and space to work in. It has been said that all martyrdoms looked mean in the suffering.
Ah, thrice happy, thrice blessed, thrice crowned lovers! How swiftly passed those golden hours, as hand in hand, they sat entranced, with soulful eyes in silent communion, dreaming and drifting in the cloud-land of love's harvest-moon, in whose silvery mist they lost all consciousness of the existence in this world of aught else beside themselves!
As it was, if at one moment she was in a cloud-land of her own, or poring over the stories of the Iliad, the classic mythologies, or Tasso's Gerusalemme, the next would see her scouring the fields with Ursule and Hippolyte, playing practical jokes on the tutor, and extemporizing wild out-of-door games and dances with her village companions. Of serious religious education she received none at all.
The doctrine of our author, then, is confessedly a pure hypothesis, and, as such, it might be summarily dismissed into the region of cloud-land and dreams, where it had its origin. The burden of proof is upon him, and as he has failed to produce a single instance in which his theory is exemplified, he may be rightfully debarred the privilege of discussion.
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