Under the Sky

IN the ancient poets the supreme deity is often put for the sky, the recognized empire of that deity. “ Behold the glowing vault sublime, that all call Jove ! ” sings one of these early bards ; another makes use of such phrases as " sub Jove frigido,” and " malus Jupiter:” from all which we gather that there was not only a fair-weather Jove, but a foul-weather Jove, a rainy Jupiter and an arid Jupiter ; besides, a cloud-driver and a lightener ; in every phase of the weather, a god present and regnant. Somehow, in all ages, spiritual heaven has been confusedly associated with the physical heavens. That intuitive religion fixes the home of the Supreme and the Unknown in regions far supramundane is shown in the natural ritual of the eyes and hands in prayer. There was a fine and high symbolism expressed in the architecture of the old hypæthral temples, built as they were without roof, and open to the light and breath of heaven, to the storm as well as to the serene azure. Who could not have worshiped there without compromise to his faith ? And yet such a temple would hardly have been hypæthral enough for our devouter moments ; nothing less than all out of-doors would have satisfied.

Would you for a while shut out the earth and fill your eye with the heavens, lie down, some summer day, on the great mother’s lap, with a soft grass pillow under your head ; then look around and above you, and see how slight, apparently, is your terrestrial environment, how foreshortened has become the foreground, — only a few nodding bents of blossomed grass, a spray of clover with a bumble-bee probing for honey, and in the distance, perhaps, the billowy outline of the diminished woods. What else you see is the blue of heaven illimitably stretched above and around you. You seem to be lying, not so much on the surface of earth as at the bottom of the sky. Under this still, transparent sea, “ deeper than did ever plummet sound,” your own thoughts and imaginings have become a treasure trove of inestimable wealth and rarity. You do not care to move, lest in so doing you break the deep sky charm, and your treasure-trove vanish. An interval of sky-gazing might well be recommended as a palliative in exaggerated cases of irritability. Let the patient bathe his fevered or lacerated soul in the third and highest heaven, and see what oblivious comfort he will experience. No individual grievance, crying lustily at the earth’s surface, but if it turn its face upward, the serenity of heaven will smile it out of countenance, and send it away shrunken and abashed. A child once assured me that “ blue eyes come from looking at the sky a great deal, — until your eyes get full of the sky.” Few are the blue-eyed people who are so from much visual communion with the open heavens.

We can scarcely believe that any mortal lives under fairer skies than ours. On the Atlantic coast they cannot see more orient sunrises, or on the Pacific sunsets more occidental. Nowhere else does the winter zenith, untracked by the low sun, show a wilder and lovelier depth of azure. We might have had a satiety of fair-weather skies, if there had not been interspersed with these a thrilling variety of inclement skies. Nowhere else have been seen sublimer confusions of storm-clouds cut by more trenchant and beautiful lightnings. If we do not live on the sea-coast, we are at least admirably situated on the sky coast. The airy and the azure sea everywhere flows in. Projecting into it, the mountains may be reckoned as bold headlands and promontories, on which the cloud armadas drive and go to pieces ; the hills are gently curving capes, and all hollow intervals are the gulfs, bays, and inlets of heaven. All is sky coast; no inland, unless it be in earth,— the mine and the cavern. Entering the latter, with a lighted torch in hand, you are likely to discover in the roof an illusory heaven, a crystal-studded counterfeit of night and the stars.

Each season — it might almost be said each month — has its peculiar skyand-cloud scene. The time of year is kept in the heavens as well as upon the earth. These shifting, semi-lucent, many-tinted clouds (pale rose, amber, lilac, and even greenish) belong unmistakably to the skies of April. There we read tender and delicate prophecy of the earliest flowers, arbutus, anemone, cress, and violet, and the light cold leafage with which they are mingled in forest ways. The June sky shows the least admixture of red. Is it not possible that the common atmosphere has become so diaphanous that we look through it into very ether? How quickly the clouds dissolve in it, even as flakes of snow dissolve in some still and dark mountain spring! Those vanishing flecks and films of white give fitting body to the poet’s dream of

After the month of June the atmosphere loses much of its marvelous purity and transparency. It is another sky which bends over the shorn and sheaved fields than that which hung above green meadows and grain-fields in fragrant blossom. In July, the noon heavens are a realization of white heat. If there is ripeness in the fields of earth, there is also ripeness in the fields of air; the opulence of harvest is matched by rich, warm, and tremulous skies, by sunsets more lavish in pageantry. At night the moon rolls up her disk, large and fervid, as though rising from regions of perpetual summer midday. The skies of autumn, when not veiled in mist, and when foiled by the crimsons, russets, and yellows of the frost-bitten woodlands, show a deeper and intenser blue than the skies of June. Deeper still are those glimpses of blue seen through ragged cracks in the dun and gray clouds of midwinter ; narrow and devious rivers they seem, lost among nubilous gorges and cañons. I remember a wild sky at the breaking up of winter, in which the clouds lay in serried masses of uniform curve and shading; the whole heavens, thus masked, presenting the appearance of a “chopped sea ” whose waves were held in frozen abeyance. Sometimes, the cloud-work of the winter sky suggests medallions of ivory or agate carved upon lapis lazuli, so vivid is the contrast between cloud and sky.

No weather observations are so likely to be casually and carelessly made as those which refer to the sky. The chronicler of a perfect day usually begins with the specification that “ there was not a cloud to be seen but it is highly probable that, if he had searched the horizon, he would have detected some nebulous straw sufficient to show the drift of the wind. Sometimes there will be formed in the upper regions of the sky a thin, unobvious scarf of vapor, not unlike the magnified texture of crape, or the finest and softest rolls of wool.

The clouds of night take the posture of rest, stretching themselves out along the horizon, as though to make earth their couch. The clouds of the daytime are rolling and augmentative, erecting themselves in dome-like masses. A favorite harborage for the great cumulus fleets is just above the southeastern horizon. There they remain half a sultry summer day, often threatening with harmless lightning flashes the rain which does not come. These clouds are full of pictorial and sculptural suggestion. There may be seen the plump cherubs in which the old masters delighted, the confused tumblings of Phæthon and his horses, or the gods and heroes of the Elgin marbles in all their mutilated and pathetic grandeur. We see in the clouds whatever our own imagination, or that of another, bids us see; some new semblance unfolding itself with every alteration of the vapory outline. “ Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?” “By the mass, and ’t is like a camel, indeed.” “Methinks it is like a weasel.” “ It is backed like a weasel.” “ Or like a whale ? ” “ Very like a whale.” Ten to one, the eye of old Polonius sympathetically verified the successive images suggested by the skipping fancy of Hamlet.

The sailor, of necessity, has a more intimate acquaintance than the landsman with the physical signs of heaven. How shall he be advised of approaching danger if not by reading the bulletins of the sky and the clouds ? On the barren plain around him are no trees to hint of rain by showing the white under side of their leaves; no barometrical flowers, like the dandelion and chickweed, to give warning with their quick-closing eyelids. The mariner may be presumed to know the tonnage of every cloud sighted on the upper deep, whether the cargo be wind, rain, or rattling hail. The complexion of the cloud also advises him of its friendliness or its hostility, just as the colors run up on the mast of a passing vessel would indicate the home port and nationality of the crew. The sailor may well keep a keen outlook on the sky and its forces of cloud: he sails the sea, but he sails by the heavens. The great element, in whose mercy he directly lies, is itself at the mercy of a wider and more potential element; for the sea, vast body of inanity as it is, is incapable of injury except at the instigation of Euroclydon and his fellows. “There comes that gang again,” a veteran admiral was in the habit of saying when the winds rose, and a great storm was upon his track.

It is seldom that with high winds we have a bright and cloudless sky. The wind does not hunt for nothing. Sometimes it seems to be routing and dispersing the clouds for no other purpose than to accomplish their fright and discomfiture ; to compare great things with small, it takes them in its teeth, and gives them the terrier grip, shaking and tearing them into a thousand tatters. Other times, with what one might imagine a herding instinct, it gently but forcibly drives together the stragglers from all quarters of the sky, collecting them in close ranks along the horizon. Then, often, we see

Science has been charged with many deeds of vandalism and desecration. “ There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,” the poet tells us ; but in the next line we learn that its strands have been unbraided, and that now it is mentioned “ in the dull catalogue of common things.” The last time the rainbow showed herself in our heavens, I was satisfied that science might be acquitted ; that nothing had ever been subtracted from the mysterious and unsearchable beauty of the seven-tinted arch. Old as the flood, it is the same brilliant new wonder to us as to the children of Noah. If they construed it for a promise, we may interpret it as a record. Hanging aloft is the palette with the ranged and graded colors which were used in the painting of the world : lowest in order, the red and the yellow of the adust and tawny sands and of the earth’s volcanic heart-fires ; next, the green, from which were laid on the drapery tints worn by the fields, the woods, and the rocky shoulders of the hills; last of all, the blue and cool amethystine shades of the distant ocean, the high and airy mountains, and the sky itself. Though reserved as the pendant of the summer rain-cloud, we not infrequently see, in other phases of the weather, fugitive gleams and traces of the messenger sprite. In winter, a bank of clouds will often be overshot with a flickering iridescence, whence the “ mother o’ pearl flocks ’’ that some one has so aptly noted. Lunar halos and those spectral appearances observed near the sun (familiarly spoken of as “ sun dogs ”) all wear, in some degree, the livery of the rainbow.

While we traverse the sky in vision and fancy only, we are aware that more practical voyagers are abroad. Yonder hawk, floating about like a pennon detached from the staff, seems to keep aloft not so much by his own exertions as by his being lighter than the element in which he moves. Raptorial and cruel as he is known to be, he still embodies, as no other winged creature can, the serene vitality and elasticity of the air. If not the bird of Jove, he must belong to some of the Immortals. Is not a bird amphibious, a creature of two lives, one upon the earth and another in the sky ? Its nidification in the tree-top or on the crag, on the very hem or fringe of the earth, bespeaks it more an aerial than a terrestrial citizen. The finding of a dead bird is always, to me, something of a surprise and painful shock. It had wings ; then why did it not get safely out of the way of mortal calamity ? I should like to credit that old myth of the phœnix and its fiery rejuvenation. A bird should not die, but be translated : the eagle to the storm cloud, the brilliant tanager and oriole to the flame of the evening sky, and the bluebird to its native cerulean.

At sunrise and sunset, the imagination becomes more venturous. The horizon gates being open for the passage of the sun, it slips through, steals his skill, and sets sail for the shores of fable. Does the sun go down, greatsphered and cloudless, through a field of clear gold, imagination pursues, and sees him traversing the Pacific, lighting to-morrow as he goes.

From what point of view do we observe that the sun goes under the cloud ? Strange inversion of fact! With our heads to the nadir, our feet to the zenith, there would be pertinence in such an observation. It is some cheer to know that, in spite of our topsy-turvy notions of cosmos, the sun never does go under, but always over, the clouds. We alone are under the clouds, — “ under the weather.”

Edith M. Thomas.