worthy of the skies. There is no distance, except the distance in the
sky, to be seen from the level earth; but from the height is to be seen
the distance of this world. The line is sent back into the remoteness of
light, the verge is removed beyond verge, into a distance that is
enormous and minute.

So delicate and so slender is the distant horizon that nothing less near
than Queen Mab and her chariot can equal its fineness. Here on the edges
of the eyelids, or there on the edges of the world--we know no other
place for things so exquisitely made, so thin, so small and tender. The
touches of her passing, as close as dreams, or the utmost vanishing of
the forest or the ocean in the white light between the earth and the air;
nothing else is quite so intimate and fine. The extremities of a
mountain view have just such tiny touches as the closeness of closed eyes
shuts in.

On the horizon is the sweetest light. Elsewhere colour mars the
simplicity of light; but there colour is effaced, not as men efface it,
by a blur or darkness, but by mere light. The bluest sky disappears on
that shining edge; there is not substance enough for colour. The rim of
the hill, of the woodland, of the meadow-land, of the sea--let it only be
far enough--has the same absorption of colour; and even the dark things
drawn upon the bright edges of the sky are lucid, the light is among
them, and they are mingled with it. The horizon has its own way of
making bright the pencilled figures of forests, which are black but
luminous.

On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky. There
you perceive that an ordinary sky of clouds--not a thunder sky--is not a
wall but the underside of a floor. You see the clouds that repeat each