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Originally Posted by doubleshuffle
How about a great descriptive passage?
The last sunset of the year had been stormy; the whole sky, as I saw it from the Pincio, blazed like a conflagration; fire caught the farthest roofs of Rome, and seemed to sear the edges and outskirts of the city, like a great flame coming down from heaven. This flame burnt with an unslackening ardency long after the sun had gone down below the horizon; then the darkness began to creep about it, and it grew sombre, drooping into purple, withering into brown, dwindling into a dull violet, and from that wandering into a fainter and fainter greyness, until the roofs, jutting like abrupt shadows into the night, seemed to go up like smoke all round the city, as if the great fire were smouldering out.
Arthur Symons.
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Lovely. Here is Lafcadio Hearn describing the Gulf.
"The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles, — a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was God; — it was indeed under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern havens Espiritu Santo, — the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe, — something vital, something holy, something pantheistic: and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the Πνεύμα (Pneuma) indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm, — save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and Space you begin to dream with open eyes, — to drift into delicious oblivion of facts, — to forget the past, the present, the substantial, — to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly away forever...."
Lafcadio Hearn.
Chita: A Memory of Last Island.