Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1015

Rh buy her a sunrise. Even while you run to fetch her to look at it, it is gone. He will not even wait while she dons a morning wrapper,—that arrogant Whistler of the sky. Transitory as emotion, it has the same pathos as all poignant passing things, this art of the heavens, the same keen excitement.

Perhaps we should soon learn to tire of it if it were not so mobile. Even some masterpieces have hung too long upon the walls of time. It is this expressive movement of sensitive vapor, this unforeseen touch of change here and there—a shining finger seen for a moment and then withdrawn,—this disposition and re-disposition of masses, this slow womblike trouble of darkness and light, this sudden avenue of splendid swords, this calm overture of glory, these marching trumpets of light—this radiant issue of immortal fire: it is in such effects as this that the mysterious art of the sky o'er-tops the arts of earth. Fading as it is fashioned, it has a power to move the heart and stir the senses, and, above all, to thrill and summon the soul, which surely no earthly arts can claim. With no formulæ, no conventions, no traditional motives, classically to command us—absolutely without notation of any kind—it is yet able to say all that the human heart has ever felt or ever dreamed.

There is no emotion of whatever kind that you cannot, one time or another, find expressed for you in the sky. If you are sad and lonely, and your heart almost breaking with the fine-drawn music of regret, look at yonder sky. You are not so sad and lonely as that. Why, you almost forget your own sorrow as you gaze on that exquisite sorrow.

Would you have silence, would you dream of a peace made of mother-of-pearl and the evening star: there again is the sky!

And would you be pure, and firm of faith, and free as the boundless air—look at the sky.

On the other hand, did you ever see a face so wicked as is sometimes the face of the sky, so sinister with hushed menace, so livid with ambushed evil, so truculently brutal with thunder?

There is nothing that you can dream of or dread that is not pictured in the