The Pleasures of Life Part 25

And when we raise our eyes from earth, who has not sometimes felt "the witchery of the soft blue sky;" who has not watched a cloud floating upward as if on its way to heaven, or when

"Sunbeam proof, I hang like a roof The mountain its columns be." [10]

And yet "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 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 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 pa.s.sed, 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." [11]

But exquisitely lovely as is the blue arch of the midday sky, with its inexhaustible variety of clouds, "there is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper feeling of the beautiful, the light of the declining or breaking day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch-fires in the green sky of the horizon." [12] The evening colors indeed soon fade away, but as night comes on,

"How glorious the firmament With living sapphires! Hesperus that led The starry host, rode brightest; till the moon Rising in clouded majesty, at length, Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light, And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw." [13]

We generally speak of a beautiful night when it is calm and clear, and the stars shine brightly overhead; but how grand also are the wild ways of Nature, how magnificent when the lightning flashes, "between gloom and glory;" when

"From peak to peak, the rattling crags among Leaps the live thunder." [14]

In the words of Ossian--

"Ghosts ride in the tempest to-night; Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind, Their songs are of other worlds."

Nor are the wonders and beauties of the heavens limited by the clouds and the blue sky, lovely as they are. In the heavenly bodies we have before us "the perpetual presence of the sublime." They are so immense and so far away, and yet on soft summer nights "they seem leaning down to whisper in the ear of our souls." [15]

"A man can hardly lift up his eyes toward the heavens," says Seneca, "without wonder and veneration, to see so many millions of radiant lights, and to observe their courses and revolutions, even without any respect to the common good of the Universe."

Who does not sympathize with the feelings of Dante as he rose from his visit to the lower regions, until, he says,

"On our view the beautiful lights of heaven Dawned through a circular opening in the cave, Thence issuing, we again beheld the stars."

As we watch the stars at night they seem so still and motionless that we can hardly realize that all the time they are rushing on with a velocity far far exceeding any that man has ever accomplished.

Like the sands of the sea, the stars of heaven have ever been used as an appropriate symbol of number, and we know that there are some 75,000,000, many, no doubt, with planets of their own. But this is by no means all.

The floor of heaven is not only "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," but is studded also with extinct stars, once probably as brilliant as our own sun, but now dead and cold, as Helmholtz tells us our sun itself will be some seventeen millions of years hence. Then, again, there are the comets, which, though but few are visible to us at once, are even more numerous than the stars; there are the nebulae, and the countless minor bodies circulating in s.p.a.ce, and occasionally visible as meteors.

Nor is it only the number of the heavenly bodies which is so overwhelming; their magnitude and distances are almost more impressive. The ocean is so deep and broad as to be almost infinite, and indeed in so far as our imagination is the limit, so it may be. Yet what is the ocean compared to the sky? Our globe is little compared to the giant orbs of Jupiter and Saturn, which again sink into insignificance by the side of the sun. The sun itself is almost as nothing compared with the dimensions of the solar system. Sirius is calculated to be a thousand times as great as the Sun, and a million times as far away. The solar system itself travels in one region of s.p.a.ce, sailing between worlds and worlds, and is surrounded by many other systems as great and complex as itself; and we know that even then we have not reached the limits of the Universe itself.

There are stars so distant that their light, though traveling 180,000 miles in a second, yet takes years to reach us; and beyond all these are other systems of stars which are so far away that they cannot be perceived singly, but even in our most powerful telescopes appear only as minute clouds or nebulae. It is, indeed, but a feeble expression of the truth to say that the infinities revealed to us by Science,--the infinitely great in the one direction, and the infinitely small in the other,--go far beyond anything which had occurred to the unaided imagination of Man, and are not only a never-failing source of pleasure and interest, but seem to lift us out of the petty troubles and sorrows of life.

[1] Beattie.

[2] Tennyson.

[3] Thomas a Kempis.

[4] Gray.

[5] Shakespeare.

[6] Tennyson.

[7] Trench.

[8] Thomson.

[9] Ruskin.

[10] Sh.e.l.ley.

[11] Ruskin.

[12] _Ibid_.

[13] Wordsworth.

[14] Swinburne.

[15] Symonds.

CHAPTER IX.

THE TROUBLES OF LIFE.

CHAPTER IX.

THE TROUBLES OF LIFE.

We have in life many troubles, and troubles are of many kinds. Some sorrows, alas, are real enough, especially those we bring on ourselves, but others, and by no means the least numerous, are mere ghosts of troubles: if we face them boldly, we find that they have no substance or reality, but are mere creations of our own morbid imagination, and that it is as true now as in the time of David that "Man disquieteth himself in a vain shadow."

Some, indeed, of our troubles are evils, but not real; while others are real, but not evils.

"And yet, into how unfathomable a gulf the mind rushes when the troubles of this world agitate it. If it then forget its own light, which is eternal joy, and rush into the outer darkness, which are the cares of this world, as the mind now does, it knows nothing else but lamentations." [1]

"Athens," said Epictetus, "is a good place,--but happiness is much better; to be free from pa.s.sions, free from disturbance."

We should endeavor to maintain ourselves in

"That blessed mood In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight, Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened." [2]

So shall we fear "neither the exile of Aristides, nor the prison of Anaxagoras, nor the poverty of Socrates, nor the condemnation of Phocion, but think virtue worthy our love even under such trials." [3] We should then be, to a great extent, independent of external circ.u.mstances, for

"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage, Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.

"If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free; Angels alone that soar above Enjoy such liberty." [4]

Happiness indeed depends much more on what is within than without us. When Hamlet says the world is "a goodly prison; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons; Denmark being one of the worst," and Rosencrantz differs from him, he rejoins wisely, "Why then, 'tis none to you: for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison." "All is opinion," said Marcus Aurelius. "That which does not make a man worse, how can it make his life worse? But death certainly, and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, all these things happen equally to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse."