The brilliant deep-blue Italian skies of the Middle and Southern States are full of poetry, and will repay the most careful and prolonged study.  I have seen, far up in the zenith, silvery fringes of cirrus clouds forming and melting away at the same moment and in the same place, ethereal and evanescent as a dream, easel-studies of Nature.  Sometimes the clouds take the form of most airily-delicate brown crape, “hatchelled” on the sky in minute lines and limnings.  Now the sky looks like a sweet silver-azure ceiling, the blue peeping here and there through tender masses of silver frosting.  The skies of the New England coast States are filled, during a large part of spring, summer and autumn, with a white and dreamy haze, and do not produce cloud-phenomena on such an imposing scale as the more brilliant skies of the interior.  I shall never forget a vast and glowing sunset-scene I once witnessed in the Ohio Valley.  It lasted but a few moments, but what a spectacle!  The setting sun was throwing his golden light over the intensely green earth, and suffusing the irregular masses of clouds now with a tender rosy light and now with delicate saffron.  All along the eastern horizon extended a black-blue cloud-curtain of about twenty degrees in height, across which played the zigzag gold of the lightning.  Overhead hung the gigantic ring of a complete rainbow (a rare phenomenon), looking like the iridescent rim of some vast sun that had shot from its orbit and was rapidly nearing our earth.  In the north the while slept the sweet blue sky in peace.  What a phantasmagoria of splendor, “the magic-lantern of Nature”!  What a rich contrast of color!—­the black and the gold, the green, saffron, rose and azure, and the whole crowned with a rainbow garland of glowing flowers.  I felt assured that no sunset of Italy or Greece could fling upon the sky more costly pictures than these.

The delicacy and accuracy of touch exhibited in The Scarlet Letter and in Oldport Days can hardly be appreciated to the full by those who are unacquainted with certain mellow and crumbling towns and hamlets of the New England coast, especially of the warm south coast.  Soft mists rise in summer like “rich distilled perfumes” from the warm Gulf Stream off Long Island Sound and drift landward in invisible airy volumes.  Suddenly, as at a given signal, the sky becomes troubled, grows dun:  trembling dew-specks glister upon the leaves, and in a few moments the gray fog starts out of the air on every side and clings to tree, crag and house like shroud to corpse.  It is this warm moisture that gives to the south-coast hamlets their mellow tint.  I have especially in mind at this moment one romantic village whose stout old yeoman elms hold their protecting foliage-shields over many a gray mansion as rich in tradition as the House of the Seven Gables, and only awaiting the touch of some wizard hand to become immortalized.  The prevailing tint of these old houses, and of everything