The whole sky from
the zenith to the horizon becomes one molten mantling sea of colour and
fire; every black bar turns into massy gold, every ripple and wave into
unsullied shadowless crimson, and purple, and scarlet, and colours for
which there are no words in language, and no ideas in the mind--things
which can only be conceived while they are visible; the intense hollow
blue of the upper sky melting through it all, showing here deep, and
pure, and lightless; there, modulated by the filmy formless body of the
transparent vapour, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson and
gold. The concurrence of circumstances necessary to produce the sunsets
of which I speak does not take place above five or six times in a
summer, and then only for a space of from five to ten minutes, just as
the sun reaches the horizon. Considering how seldom people think of
looking for a sunset at all, and how seldom, if they do, they are in a
position from which it can be fully seen, the chances that their
attention should be awake, and their position favourable, during these
few flying instants of the year, are almost as nothing.
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