...And great cloud-continents of sunset-seas.

The fragment is a densely metaphorical image typical of Aldrich’s late-19th-century lyric style: clouds at sunset are imagined as vast “continents,” while the sky becomes a “sea” suffused with sunset color. The compounded phrase “cloud-continents of sunset-seas” fuses land and ocean imagery to convey scale, distance, and a kind of sublime, painterly grandeur. The line suggests a moment when ordinary atmospheric phenomena are transfigured by perception—nature read as a map or globe—inviting the reader to experience wonder and imaginative expansion rather than literal description.