A narrow white cloud resting on every mountain

November 12.

It clears up. A very bright rainbow. Three reds and greens, in the southeast, heightening the green of the pines. 

From Fair Haven Hill, I see a very distant, long, low dark-blue cloud in the northwest horizon beyond the mountains, and against this I see, apparently, a narrow white cloud resting on every mountain and conforming exactly to its outline — as if the white frilled edge of the main cloud were turned up over them. In fact, the massive dark-blue cloud beyond revealed these distinct white caps resting on the mountains this side, for twenty miles along the horizon. 

The sun having set, my long dark cloud has assumed the form of an alligator, and where the sun has just disappeared it is split into two tremendous jaws, between which glows the eternal city, its crenate lips all coppery golden, its serrate fiery teeth. Its body lies a slumbering mass along the horizon.

H. D, Thoreau, Journal, November 12, 1852

A narrow white cloud resting on every mountain and conforming exactly to its outline.  See August 9, 1860 ("A beautiful and serene object, a sort of fortunate isle in the sunset sky, the local cloud of the mountain.”) See also November 11, 1851 ("The horizon has one kind of beauty and attraction to him who has never explored the hills and mountains in it, and another . . . to him who has."); November 22, 1860 ("Simply to see to a distant horizon through a clear air, - the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue mountaintop through some new vista, - this is wealth enough for one afternoon.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Mountains in the Horizon

November 12. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 12

A narrow white cloud 

resting on every mountain

in the horizon.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A narrow white cloud resting on every mountain

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2022

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-521112

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