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IT

SECTION V.

I.

16. THE SKY.

T is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done mōre for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evidènt purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

2. There are not many of her other works in which some mōre material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great ugly black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew.

3. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glōry after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And ěvèry man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interèst or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly.

4. The noblèst scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them, he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them; but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not "too bright, nor good, for human nature's daily food;" it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us,

is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement' or of blessing to what is mortal is essential.

5. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration.

6. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity,' we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena3 do we speak of? One says it has been wet, and another it has been windy, and another it has been warm. Who, among the whōle chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon' at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south and smote upon their summits until they melted and moldered ǎway in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves?

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7. All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy' be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is grōss, or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice.

1 Chastisement (chas' tiz ment), pain inflicted for punishment and correction.

face which may be seen by a person from a given place; the place where the earth and sky seem, to the be

2 In`si pĭd' i ty, want of taste, holder, to meet. spirit, or animation.

3 Phe nŏm' e na, appearances; those things which, in matter or spirit, are apparent to, or apprehended by observation.

4 Ho ri' zon, the circle which bounds that part of the earth's sur

"Ap' a thy, want, or a low degree, of feeling; calmness of mind incapable of being ruffled by pleasure, pain, or passion.

6 Extraordinary (ěks trår dĩ nări), out of the common course; more than common.

8. They are but the blunt and low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual-that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are never wanting, and never repeated, which are to be found always yet cach found but once; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given.

9. It seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of the heavens God means us to acknowledge His own immediate presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. "The earth shook, the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God." "He doth set his bow in the cloud," and thus renews, in the sound of every drooping swath of rain, his promises of everlasting love.

10. "In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun;" whose burning ball, which without the firmamènt would be seen as an intolerable and scorching circle in the blacknèss of vacuity,' is by that firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by mediatōrial' ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden pavement is spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of the firmament his implacable light is divided, and its separated fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains burn as they drink the oveowing of the dayspring.

11. And in this tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His own majesty to men, upon the throne of the firmament. As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity, we can not behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of men, those heavens are indeed His dwelling place.

1 Va ċu' i ty, space unfilled or unoccupied; emptiness; void,

2 'Mē`di a tō'ri al, belonging to a mediator, or one who interposes

between parties at variance to reconcile them.

9 Im plā' ċa ble, not to be appeased or pacified; relentless.

12. "Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool." And all those passings to and fro of fruitful shower and grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built about the horiʼzon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders, and glories of colored robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our hearts the acceptance, and distinctness, and dearnèss of the simple words, "Our Father, which art in heaven."

RUSKIN.

JOHN RUSKIN, an English author, was born in London in February, 1819. He was graduated in 1842 at Christchurch College, Oxford, having gained the Newdigate prize for English poetry. He has devoted much time to the study of art, including painting and architecture. His first volume of "Modern Painters" was published in 1843; his second, treating "Of the Imaginative and Theoretic Faculties," in 1846; and his fifth and last volume of the series in 1860. He has published many works, including lectures, and contributions to periodicals, on drawing, architecture, painting, etc. He is noted for the rhetorical brilliancy of his style, the eloquence of his descriptive passages, and his positive though sometimes paradoxical views. Among his more recent publications are "Sesame and Lilies," in 1864; "The Crown of Wild Olive," and "The Ethics of the Dust," in 1866; and "Queen of the Air," in 1869.

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II.

17. THE CLOUD.

BRING fresh showers for the thirsty flowers,
From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noon-day dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken

The sweet birds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast
As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

2. I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,

While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skyey bowers
Lightning, my pilot, sits;

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,

It struggles and howls at fits.

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The spirit he loves remains;

And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

3. The sanguine' sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead.

As on the jag of a mountain crag,

Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

An eagle alit one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings;

And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardors of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of heaven above,

With wings folded I rest on mine airy nest,

As still as a brooding dove.

4. That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,

Glides glimmering ō'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn ;

And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,

Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in

my

wind-built tent,

1 Sanguine (săng' gwin), having the color of blood; red; warm.

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