nor stain.  It was a favor for which to be forever silent to be shown this vision.  The earth beneath had become such a flitting thing of lights and shadows as the clouds had been before.  It was not merely veiled to me, but it had passed away like the phantom of a shadow, skia’s o’nar, and this new platform was gained.  As I had climbed above storm and cloud, so by successive days’ journeys I might reach the region of eternal day, beyond the tapering shadow of the earth; ay,

             “Heaven itself shall slide,
        And roll away, like melting stars that glide
        Along their oily threads.”

But when its own sun began to rise on this pure world, I found myself a dweller in the dazzling halls of Aurora, into which poets have had but a partial glance over the eastern hills, drifting amid the saffron-colored clouds, and playing with the rosy fingers of the Dawn, in the very path of the Sun’s chariot, and sprinkled with its dewy dust, enjoying the benignant smile, and near at hand the far-darting glances of the god.  The inhabitants of earth behold commonly but the dark and shadowy under-side of heaven’s pavement; it is only when seen at a favorable angle in the horizon, morning or evening, that some faint streaks of the rich lining of the clouds are revealed.  But my muse would fail to convey an impression of the gorgeous tapestry by which I was surrounded, such as men see faintly reflected afar off in the chambers of the east.  Here, as on earth, I saw the gracious god

“Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
. . . . . . 
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.”

But never here did “Heaven’s sun” stain himself.

But, alas, owing, as I think, to some unworthiness in myself, my private sun did stain himself, and

“Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly wrack on his celestial face,”—­

for before the god had reached the zenith the heavenly pavement rose and embraced my wavering virtue, or rather I sank down again into that “forlorn world,” from which the celestial sun had hid his visage,—­

“How may a worm that crawls along the dust,
Clamber the azure mountains, thrown so high,
And fetch from thence thy fair idea just,
That in those sunny courts doth hidden lie,
Clothed with such light as blinds the angel’s eye? 
How may weak mortal ever hope to file
His unsmooth tongue, and his deprostrate style? 
O, raise thou from his corse thy now entombed exile!”

In the preceding evening I had seen the summits of new and yet higher mountains, the Catskills, by which I might hope to climb to heaven again, and had set my compass for a fair lake in the southwest, which lay in my way, for which I now steered, descending the mountain by my own route, on the side opposite to that by which I had ascended, and soon found myself in the region of cloud and drizzling rain, and the inhabitants affirmed that it had been a cloudy and drizzling day wholly.