American citizen. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 1864-1890, 1872-06-15
The Lesson OF the Sky.

IT is strange thing how little in gen.
eral people know about the sky. 1t is the
part of creation in which nature has done
more for the sake of pleasing man, more
for the sole and evident purpose of talk
ing 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 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 thereabout great ugly
black rain-cloud were brought up over the
blue, and everything well watered, and
so allleft blue again till next time, with
perhaps 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 ex-
most perfect beauty, that it is quite GER
tain that it is all done for US, and intend
ed 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 Injuries 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 hu-
man natures 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 in its tender
ness, almost divine in its infinity, its ap-
peal to what is immortal in us is as dis
tinct as its ministry of chastisement or of
blessing to what is mortal or essential
And yet we never attend to it, we never
make it 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 of the intention of
the Supreme, that we are to receive more
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 monotonous acct
dents too common and too vain to be
worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or
glance of admiration. If in our mo-
ments 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
whole 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 submits I'M
til they melted and moldered 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
mas 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 whrlwind, 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.
They are but the blunt, low faculties of
our nature which can only be addressed
through lampblack and lightning 1t is
in quiet and subdued passages of unob-
trusivc majesty, the deep and the calm
and the perpetual-that which must be
sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is
seen, and loved ere it is understood, things
which the angels work out for us daily,
and yet vary eternally, which are never
wanting, and never repeated, which are to
he found always, yet each found but once;
it is through these that the lesson of de
votion is chiefly taught, and the blessing
of beauty given.-Rushin.
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