Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1020



shall only know that when we can affirmatively answer those majestic questions put by the Eternal to the stricken Job; when we know where the light dwelleth, and as for darkness, where is the place thereof; when we have entered into the treasures of the snow, and seen the treasure of the hail, and discovered the hidden ordinances of heaven.

Yes, there is nothing in nature more provocative of meditation than these painted phantoms of the sky, so transitory that the life of a flower is long by comparison; and one other element of strangeness about them is that they are literally phantoms, and in a sense subjective appearances, the shape and color of which are not merely determined by the physical materials of which they are composed, but by the distance from which they are seen. So it is with some pictures—Sargent's portraits, for example. Seen close, we have but an unmeaning motley of paint. The distance is literally a part of the enchantment. Literally, there is no picture close to; and so it is with the clouds. It is open to the moralist to say that so it is with life itself, more or less so with all our experience; for is not Life a species of Fata Morgana seen afar off in youth, a wonderland of rainbows to which we hasten through the morning dew? But when at length in middle age we come to occupy these cloud-capped towers—alas! for the fairy colors and the glory forever passed away. And yet I don't know but that this is a superficial moral to draw from the clouds; indeed, I am more than a little sure that it is, and for myself prefer rather to put my trust in those mystical intimations of immortality with which, as I said before, they beckon the soul. Even in their very immateriality and transitoriness, their brief existence of pure effect, there is something that delights, and is. so to speak, cousinly to, the spirit, whose own life is a vapor, blown before the breath of God, and for a little while colored by the sun. They are but appearances, yet so are we and the whole world; passing embodiments of the Protean soul of things, all alike mysterious, all alike stirring in us the need of an interpreter, but none more, perhaps, than these shapes of air and shining dew.