Atmosphere

“ The atmosphere of the spiritual world is a vast aerial ocean like ours, bearing in its bosom the higher and more subtile spiritual forces. It receives, absorbs and reflects the divine heat and light, and tempers them to the state of the spirits and angels who live and move in it. ”

“ CHAPTER I. INFLUENCE, AND THE ATMOSPHERE MAN CARRIES. Nature's forces carry their atmosphere. The sun gushes forth light unquenchable; coals throw off heat; violets are larger in influence than bulb; pomegranates and spices crowd the house with sweet odors. Man also has his atmosphere. ”

“ Across the calm heavens the murk of flying atmosphere—I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could SEE the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air;—these faintly hinted at intense movement rushing down through space. ”

“ This, in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made luminous with stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to the life of man upon his planet. ”

“ The air works for him. The atmosphere, a sharp solvent, drinks the essence and spirit of every solid on the globe,—a menstruum which melts the mountains into it. Air is matter subdued [130] by heat. As the sea is the grand receptacle of all rivers, so the air is the receptacle from which all things spring, and into which they all return. ”

“ The sky is close, and when the sun is set the stars peer through the shadowy canopy, and smile. The atmosphere is fresh and pure, made fragrant with the breath of heaven, and he who breathes it feels a power divine. ”

“ For I have endlessly varied, instructive contacts with all the world, with life, with the atmosphere whose radiant activity enfolds us all. The thrilling energy of the all-encasing air is warm and rapturous. ”

“ Atmosphere represents the sum total of all the influences at a given time. The soft music of the organ, the dim light, the stillness, the attitude of prayer, all create an atmosphere to which reverence and worship are the natural response. ”

“ The atmosphere seems refined, and the sky rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the year abates; the lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring is richer and more finely harmonized ”

“ The atmosphere, indeed, must ever stand in the original formation, the result of the immediate creative act, brought together in all its volume and vast incredible capacity of receiving and holding in its grasp the gaseous residue of all earthly things. ”

“ There is a constant ratio between the quantity that runs down and the quantity that is carried back. Were evaporation to cease, or the atmosphere to stand still—were the winds never to blow, our rivers would become dry, and the earth itself unfit for man's use. What a circulator, purifier, cooler, and condenser! In every point of view this atmosphere is a grand machine—perfect in all its parts, wonderful in its offices, sublime in its operations. ”

“ The clear atmosphere enables me to see each object in its true point of view, while my heart is still. I am calm as the prospect in a morning when the mists, slowly dispersing, silently unveil the beauties of nature, refreshed by rest. ”

“ The sky is blue, the air limpid, pure, and diaphanous; the transparent atmosphere scarcely admits effects of perspective, and its ethereal mass makes the outlines of the houses, of the belfries, of the eaves, vibrate. ”

“ An ancient thinker considered that the atmosphere was full of faint images—spectra, reflections, or emanations retaining shape, though without substance—that they crowded past in myriads by day and night. Perhaps there may be thoughts invisible, but floating round us, if we could only render ourselves sensitive to their impact. ”

“ The inanimate object and the living creature in nature are not seen in the sharp contours of their isolation; they are viewed and interpreted in the atmosphere that surrounds them, in which they are enwrapped and so densely veiled that the outlines are only dimly visible, be that atmosphere the mystic grey of northern twilight or the dark velvety blue of southern summer nights. ”

“ The offices of the atmosphere are thus quaintly enumerated by Maury:—
“The atmosphere is an envelope or covering for the distribution of light and heat over the Earth; it is a sewer into which, with every breath we draw, we cast vast quantities of dead animal matter; it is a laboratory for purification, in which that matter is recompounded, and wrought again into wholesome and healthful shapes; it is a machine for pumping up all the rivers from the sea, and for conveying the water from the ocean to their sources in the mountains. ”

“ Indeed, I know of no subject more fit for profitable thought on the part of the truth-loving, knowledge-seeking student, be he seaman or landsman, than that afforded by the atmosphere and its offices. Of all parts of the physical machinery, of all the contrivances in the mechanism of the universe, the atmosphere, with its offices and its adaptations, appears to me to be the most wonderful, sublime, and beautiful. ”

“ The atmosphere, as you can feel, is warmer and softer than it was. The wind no longer blows with the same force, nor in so straightforward and unwavering a manner; it is inclined to be hesitating and changeable, as though broken by some impediment. ”

“ Our atmosphere, charged with aqueous vapour, serves to shield us from the intense action of the solar powers. By it we are protected from the destructive influences of the sun’s light and heat; enjoy those modified conditions which are most conducive to the healthful being of organic forms; to it we owe “the blue sky bending over all,” and those beauties of morning and evening twilight of which
—— Sound and motion own the potent sway. ”

“ Here the low horizon is without interest, and the contours of objects are softened, blended and blurred out by the imperceptible vapor with which the atmosphere is always filled; that which predominates is the spot. ”

“ That the air and atmosphere of our globe is in the highest degree full of life, I may, I think, take here for granted and generally admitted. It is, however, of a mixed kind and quality, combining the refreshing and balsamic breath of spring with the parching simoons of the desert, and where the healthy odors fluctuate in chaotic struggle with the most deadly vapors. ”

“ I like to think of the philosophic and speculative atmosphere as no mere gas-zone of forty-five miles' depth, as of old, but as an envelope of intense kinetic life, in the denser zone, where the logical molecules touch one another with marvelous frequency, and where there is frictional contact with the solid but rather inert lithosphere. ”

“ What is not wanted on the Earth, is stored up there, and hangs above us, far removed from our atmosphere; but yet, like the clouds in our atmosphere, an example, what glorious objects accumulations of vapor and water, illuminated by the rays of the sun, may become in our eyes. ”

“ When formed into clouds in the atmosphere it is borne back on the wings of the wind, condensed by the cold air and falls in copious showers of rain upon the earth, to purify the atmosphere, moisten and fertilize the fields and cause vegetation to spring forth in its beauty. ”

“ And thus the wonderful march of the most powerful steam-engine with which we are acquainted, the atmosphere, appears to be permanently regulated. The irregular distribution of physical qualities over the earth's surface is here seen to be a preserving principle for terrestrial life. ”

“ Heaven, or the atmosphere, is that in which the sun, moon, and stars appear; and by means of which they produce their effects. It is the grand reservoir of those particles, which, acted upon by the sun, and thus set in motion, cause heat; and preserve on the earth, life and vegetation. ”

“ Thus light is separated from darkness; waters from waters; water from earth. And by a like analogy we may suppose that the “firmament” or atmosphere, the lower part of which we breathe, was also eliminated in its component gases from the primitive shapeless bulk of matter.
If we take forty-five miles as the average height of this atmosphere above the surface of our globe, it is proportionately, like the thin rind upon an apple, or the bloom [152] upon a peach; and may very well have come forth without any violence done to nature, or any waste of her resources, from the womb of the earth. ”

“ It is by virtue of this law that each person creates his own "atmosphere"; and this atmosphere is determined by the character of the thoughts he habitually entertains. It is, in fact, simply his thought atmosphere—the atmosphere which other people detect and are influenced by. ”

“ I can't put in words what he meant; but you do it here—going up and up so gradually that you don't realize that you are in the lap, not of mountains, but of mountain peaks; breathing, not air, but ozone; uplifted by a great weight being taken off spirit and body; looking at life through rose-colored tints, not metaphorically, but really; for there is something in this high rare air—not dust, not moisture—that splits white light into its seven prismatic hues. You look through an atmosphere wonderfully rare, but it is never clear, white light. ”

“ This is not the place to unfold that attractive and hardly-opened chapter of æsthetics—to demonstrate the relation between the atmosphere and art, by interrogating the climates of the globe and the great masters of all ages, not following a system of empirical analogies and far-fetched suggestions, but led by strict physiology and rigid optic laws. A charming picture would unfold in tracing the countless and changeful aspects of the sky, and all the caprices of light and air in their influence over the moral and physical nature of painters, poets, and musicians. ”

“ The extreme transparency of the atmosphere gives to all parts of the landscape such clearness of outline that the idea of distance is destroyed, and one fancies the whole to be almost within reach of the hand. ”

“ We may add, that it is, in addition to all that we have hitherto noticed, a constant source of utility and beauty in its effects on light. Without air we should see nothing, except objects on which the sun’s rays fell, directly or by reflection. It is the atmosphere which converts sunbeams into daylight, and fills the space in which we are with illumination.
The contemplation of the atmosphere, as a machine which answers all these purposes, is well suited to impress upon us the strongest conviction of the most refined, far-seeing, and far-ruling contrivance. ”

“ Why may the atmosphere be termed a fourth kingdom of Nature?
Because it extends its influence in an equal degree over the three kingdoms, the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral, operates upon each after a distinct manner, and appears rather to be independent, and allied to all of them, than to be rightly included within any one.
Why is a knowledge of the atmosphere important to the naturalist? ”

“ One day the familiar features of the landscape will take on an expression of gladness, some other day of dullness; and the more we study the features, the more variable will their expression appear from hour to hour, day to day, and season to season.
I spoke just now of the movement of the atmosphere. It is a fluid, that one day may be as still as a forest pool, another day may be stirred like the
Light and Shade. ”

“ But if you say, can the sun be inhabited? Yes, certainly: and that too by beings of an organisation not wholly unlike our own, is my answer.” That dense and cloudy inner atmosphere we have spoken of may effectually protect it from the dazzling light of the photosphere, and conduct but little of its heat. ”

“ Its functions.—"The atmosphere affords the gas which vivifies and warms our frames; it receives into itself that which has been polluted by use, and is thrown off as noxious. It feeds the flame of life exactly as it does that of the fire. ”

“ No less perfect is the adaptation of the eye to the atmosphere, or, rather, there is a mutual adaptation; and it is as proper to say that the atmosphere is adapted to the eye, as that the eye is adapted to the atmosphere. ”

“ That the atmosphere attracts to itself, like a loadstone, all the images of the objects that exist in it, and not their forms merely but their nature may be clearly seen by the sun, which is a hot and luminous body. All the atmosphere, which is the all-pervading matter, absorbs light and heat, and reflects in itself the image of the source of that heat and splendour and, in each minutest portion, does the same. ”

“ All objects project their whole image and likeness, diffused and mingled in the whole of the atmosphere, opposite to themselves. The image of every point of the bodily surface, exists in every part of the atmosphere. All the images of the objects are in every part of the atmosphere. ”

“ And as the history of the discovery of the better known constituents of the atmosphere is of itself of great interest, and leads up to an acquaintance with the new stranger, who has so long been with us incognito, an effort has here been made to tell the tale of the air in popular language. ”

“ It is possible to conceive a planet without any general atmosphere, but in which each living body has its peculiar atmosphere. To hear and understand, one man joins his atmosphere to that of another, and, according to the sympathies of their nature, the aberrations of sound will be greater or less, and their thoughts more or less intelligible. ”

“ The atmosphere, heavy and brooding from the long exclusion of the outer air, seemed to weigh upon him with the density of matter, and to afford the stuff out of which phantasmal bodies perpetually took shape and, as he half persuaded himself, substance. ”

“ There is a motion and a spirit in the environment itself: “At the reanimating appearance of the rising sun, nature again revives”; “the atmosphere was now animated with the efficient principle of vegetative life” ”