218 OF THE OPEN SKY. 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. 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 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 monstrous accident, too common and too vain, to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If, in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena 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 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 mouldered away 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? All has passed, unregretted as unseen: or if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, 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. * Not long ago I was slowly descending the carriage road after you leave Albano. It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds mere sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up its arches OF THE OPEN SKY. 219 like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano and the graceful darkness of its ilex grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of raincloud, in deep palpitating azure, half ether and half dew. The noon-day sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson and scarlet, like the eurtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas, arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers, dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them. fall. Every blade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet lightning opens in a cloud at sunset the motionless masses of dark rock-dark, though flushed with scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and, over all,-the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in intervals between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea. Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as 220 OF THE OPEN SKY. far away? By no means. Look at the clouds and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded lustre of their magnificent rolling. They are meant to be beheld far away they were shaped for their place high above your head: approach them and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous vapour. Look at the crest of the Alp from the far away plains over which its light is cast, whence human souls have communed with it by their myriads. It was built for its place in the far off sky approach it, and as the sound of the voice of man dies away about its foundations, and the tide of human life is met at last by the Eternal "Here shall thy waves be staid," the glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness: its purple walls are rent into grisly rocks, its silver fret-work saddened into wasting snow: the stormbrands of ages are on its breast, the ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment. If you desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain, you must not ascend upon its sides. All there is disorder and accident, or seems so. Retire from it, and as your eye commands it more and more, you see the ruined mountain world with a wider glance; behold! dim sympathies begin to busy themselves in the disjointed mass: line binds itself into stealthy fellowship with line group by group the helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies: new captains of hosts, and masses of battalions become visible one by one; and, far away answers of foot to foot and of bone to bone, until the powerless is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap can now be spared from the mystic whole. STONES OF VENICE. POLITENESS is said to be nothing: so is an air-cushion: but it wonderfully softens the jolts of life. The Christian Courists. No aimless wanderers, by the fiend Unrest No schoolmen, turning, in their classic quest, Simple of faith, and bearing in their hearts Isles of old song, the Moslem's ancient marts, Where the long shadows of the fir and pine And the deep heart of many a Norland mine Where, in barbarie grandeur, Moskwa stands, With Europe's arts and Asia's jewelled hands, Where still, through vales of Grecian fable, stray And Beauty smiles, new risen from the spray, Lifts her tall minarets over burial-grounds Black with the cypress tree! The reader of the Biography of the late Wm. Allen, the philanthropic associate of Clarkson and Romilly, cannot fail to admire his simple and beautiful record of a tour through Europe, in the years 1818 and 1819, in the company of his American friend Stephen Grellett. 222 THE CHRISTIAN TOURISTS. From Malta's temples to the gates of Rome, Following the track of Paul, And where the Alps gird round the Switzer's home They paused not by the ruins of old time, They scanned no pictures rare, Nor lingered where the snow-locked mountains climb But unto prisons, where men lay in chains, To kings and courts forgetful of the pains Scattering sweet words, and quiet deeds of good, Their single aim the purpose to fulfil They held their pilgrim way. Yet dream not, hence the beautiful and old Were wasted on their sight, Who in the school of Christ had learned to hold Not less to them the breath of vineyards blown Not less for them the Alps in sunset shone, A life of beauty lends to all it sees The beauty of its thought; And fairest forms and sweetest harmonies Make glad its way, unsought. |