And of all beautiful things that could have been thought of or
hoped for, what should come to crown our queen of days but a
thunder-storm, a most real and vivid thunder-storm, marshalling
up from the west its grand, cumulose clouds; black, jagged,
bulging with impatient, prisoned thunder biding their time,
sharp and fierce against the brilliant sky, spreading swiftly
over the heavens, fusing into one great gray pall, dropping a
dim curtain of rain between us and the land, closing down upon
us a hollow hemisphere pierced with shafts of fire and
deafening with unseen thunders, wresting us off from the
friendly skies and shores, wrapping us into an awful solitude.
O Princess Rohan, come to me! come from the hidden caves, where
you revel in magical glories, come up from your coralline caves
in the mysterious sea, come from those Eastern lands of
nightingale, roses, and bulbuls, where your tropical soul was
born and rocked in the lap of the lotus! O sunny Southern
beauty, lost amongst Northern snows, flush forth in your
mystical splendor from the ruby wine of Hafiz, float down from
your clouds of the sunset with shining garments of light, open
the golden door of your palace domed in a lily, glide over
these inky waves, O my queen of all waters, come to me wherever
you are, with your pencil dipped in darkness, starry with
diamond dews and spanned with the softness of rainbows, and set
on this land-locked Neptune your cross of the Legion of Honor,
assure to the angry god his bowl in Valhalla, that the
thunder-vexed lake may be soothed with its immortality!

But the storm passes on, the clouds sweep magnificently away,
and the glowing sky flings up its arch of promise. The lucent
waters catch its gleam and spread in their depths a second arch