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Of the Open Sky.

RUSKIN.

It is a strange thing how little in general, people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sole and evident 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. There are not many of her other works in which some more 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 every thing well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. 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, glory 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 every man, wherever placed, however, far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest 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 and 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 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

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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.

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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

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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 curtains 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

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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.

Che Christian Courists.

No aimless wanderers, by the fiend Unrest
Goaded from shore to shore;

No schoolmen, turning, in their classic quest,
The leaves of empire o'er.

Simple of faith, and bearing in their hearts
The love of man and God,

Isles of old song, the Moslem's ancient marts,
And Scythia's steppes, they trod.

Where the long shadows of the fir and pine
In the night sun are cast,

And the deep heart of many a Norland mine
Quakes at each riving blast;

Where, in barbaric grandeur, Moskwa stands,
A baptized Scythian queen,

With Europe's arts and Asia's jewelled hands,
The North and East between!

Where still, through vales of Grecian fable, stray
The classic forms of yore,

And Beauty smiles, new risen from the spray,
And Dian weeps once more;
Where every tongue in Smyrna's mart resounds
And Stamboul from the sea

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.

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