Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1018

954 Persian carpet and Dionysiac as the feast of Belshazzar, seem somehow purged of earthly significance. Addressing- the mere mortal eye with such prismatic eloquence, their true message seems somehow to our immortal part. The beauty of the earth too often demoralizes, like the beauty of some sensual painter, but no one ever was demoralized by looking at the sky. Its pictures are like those of some Hebrew prophet, or those in the Book of Revelation. They have all the colored magnificence of earth, yet they mean nothing but heaven. There is something mysteriously pure about this artist of the sky.

But it is not merely the purity of the spirit to which he answers; it is perhaps especially the prodigious perspective of its ambition that he makes visible; for another strange thing about the sky is that it never daunts, but only corroborates, the soul. Of course there are now and again times when a solitary man lying on an empty moorland, and looking up into the sky, is momentarily impressed and overborne with his mortal insignificance; but the impression is, as I said, momentary, speedily to be followed by an exultant sense of his immortal significance—his mastery over, his spiritual possession of, all that infinite stillness and power. The arch of the sky is not really greater than the arch of his brow, and there is a starry vastness within his small skull that binds stronger bands than those of Orion. It is only when a man looks at the earth that he is afraid. So soon as he looks at the sky, that irresistible serenity of spiritual power, which he has either learned from the sky or read into it, returns to him. He feels—nay, he knows—that this sky is but the provocative avenue of his destiny, the triumphal highway of his conquering soul, hung with rosy garlands of clouds.

No argument for the immortality of the soul can compete with the rising of the moon. Man, it is to be feared, pays but little attention to doctors of divinity, but even a common sailor, as the phrase is, thinks something of his poor existence as he sights the Southern Cross. Yes, the worst and the host of us answer to, and, indeed, eagerly watch, the sky. In a sense we are all astrologers, all augurs of the clouds, and in a sense astrologers are right; for the stars are the chart of the soul.

A less transcendental observation of the clouds may yet be intrusted with a record of visible data hardly less mystical than the foregoing impressions. It must, for example, take note of the mysterious way in which Nature loves to repeat in the sky the patterns he has delighted to stamp upon this or that creature or aspect of the earth, or upon the moving curtain of the sea. Nature, like all great artists, loves to experiment with materials. He loves to try the old effect in the new medium. In summer he makes dim ferns, so delicate in shape that you can hardly believe that they have roots, except, maybe, in fairy-land; then in winter he tries the same patterns on the window-pane.

Nothing in nature, if it has happened to strike you, or if you care to give it a serious thought, is more mysterious than this decorative repetition—this duplication and reduplication of decorative pattern, now in one material and now in another. When Nature has taken a fancy to a pattern there is no work of his hands with which he will not impress it, however apparently incongruous the impression. He will as effectively depict the tiger as the lily or the deer, and crowd upon the wrings of a butterfly all the glories of earth and heaven. How he loves to emblazon some little frightened fish as though he were a fine gentleman in the sun, or hang a serpent with colored rings as though he were the planet Saturn! How he lavishes his gold and his bronze upon the beetle, and in the dead of night decks the under wings of the sleepy moth with the lost purple of Tyre! And again how he delights to rainbow the roots of inaccessible hills with gardens of amazing crystal! But nowhere is he more imitative than in the sky. There is not a color-scheme of earth, not a pattern of flower or a tint or rhythm of the sea, that he will not match for you in those misty lawns and silks and aery muslins of his; and one wonders, as one watches his phantasmagoria, where lies the secret soul of color and form in the universe, and what Nature means by this love of the same shape over and over again, and one might say the same metre. But we