SIGHTS FROM A STEEPLE

By Nathaniel Hawthorne


O! I have climbed high, and my reward is small. Here I stand, with
wearied knees, earth, indeed, at a dizzy depth below, but heaven far,
far beyond me still. O that I could soar up into the very zenith, where
man never breathed, nor eagle ever flew, and where the ethereal azure
melts away from the eye, and appears only a deepened shade of
nothingness! And yet I shiver at that cold and solitary thought. What
clouds are gathering in the golden west, with direful intent against the
brightness and the warmth of this dimmer afternoon! They are ponderous
air-ships, black as death, and freighted with the tempest; and at
intervals their thunder, the signal-guns of that unearthly squadron,
rolls distant along the deep of heaven. These nearer heaps of fleecy
vapor--methinks I could roll and toss upon them the whole day long!--
seem scattered here and there, for the repose of tired pilgrims through
the sky. Perhaps--for who can tell?--beautiful spirits are disporting
themselves there, and will bless my mortal eye with the brief appearance
of their curly locks of golden light, and laughing faces, fair and faint
as the people of a rosy dream. Or, where the floating mass so
imperfectly obstructs the color of the firmament, a slender foot and
fairy limb, resting too heavily upon the frail support, may be thrust
through, and suddenly withdrawn, while longing fancy follows them in
vain. Yonder again is an airy archipelago, where the sunbeams love to
linger in their journeyings through space. Every one of those little
clouds has been dipped and steeped in radiance, which the slightest
pressure might disengage in silvery profusion, like water wrung from a
sea-maid's hair. Bright they are as a young man's visions, and, like