Horizon

“ But it is the horizon, more than all else, you have come in search of. That is your chief companion on your way. It is to uplift the horizon to the equality of your sight that you go high. You give it a distance worthy of the skies. There is no distance, except the distance in the sky, to be seen from the level earth; but from the height is to be seen the distance of this world. The line is sent back into the remoteness of light, the verge is removed beyond verge, into a distance that is enormous and minute. ”

“ Horizon after horizon loomed over the shoulder of its fellows as the gray-draped hills rose one beyond the other and tiptoed softly away into the yonder world,—so softly that you could not tell where the earth ended and the heavens began. ”

“ The vault of heaven, one expanse of blue, or dark and studded with countless and prodigiously distant stars; the sea that stretches to the horizon and beyond it, a surface smooth as glass or breaking into innumerable waves; time, to which we can imagine no beginning and no end,—these furnish favourite examples of sublimity; and to call them great seems almost mockery, for they are images of immeasurable magnitude. ”

“ The unending vision of sky and grass, the dim, distant, and ever-shifting horizon; the ridges that seem to be rolled upon one another in motionless torpor; the effect of sunrise and sunset, of night narrowing the vision to nothing, and morning only expanding it to a shapeless blank; the sigh and sough of a breeze that seems an echo in unison with the solitude of which it is the sole voice ”

“ Or, to vary the illustration, if from the depths of a forest we glimpse a fragment of the remote horizon, and mentally complete the circle in accordance with that arc, our ring will not even be the ring of the meeting of earth and sky encompassing our standpoint; ours will be all shipless sea or green valley-bottom, while the true horizon would be sea and shore, vale and river, wood and hill, abounding with various life. ”

“ We could trace our road for miles ahead in curving lines lessening to the low horizon, inclining first this way and then that, now disappearing, to reappear again along way off. The eye—the artistic eye at any rate—rejoices in such a succession of sinuous curves, as much as it abhors the dictatorial and monotonous straight line; it likes to be led by gentle and slow degrees into the heart of the landscape, and away beyond into the infinity of space where the vague distance vanishes into the sky. ”

“ The eye travels far into the deep blue distance, tracing peak after peak in the wondrous clearness, until at length sky and mountain are blended into one line of quivering light, and the sight, fatigued with the magnitude and remoteness of objects on the vast horizon, seeks rest by gazing on the tender green of the fair valleys spread so invitingly around. ”

“ I have seen one edge of the sky raised straight up a few million miles, as though some one had stuck poles under its corners, so that the western heaven did not curve cup-wise over to the horizon at all as it did everywhere else, but rather formed the proscenium of a gigantic stage. ”

“ By climbing the downs I had raised my horizon and looked down upon the world, not with a sensation of superiority, but with a sensation of relief, being lifted for a time above all its tiresome trivialities and commonplace conventions. I found myself alone with earth, and sky, and sea, rejoicing in my loneliness, and I felt the sense of spaciousness of the wide, bright, overarching sky, of the boundless waters, and of the vast panorama of rounded hills reaching far away into the dim and dreamy distance, where the solid land looked as unsubstantial as a cloud. ”

“ On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky. There you perceive that an ordinary sky of clouds—not a thunder sky—is not a wall but the underside of a floor. You see the clouds that repeat each other grow smaller by distance; and you find a new unity in the sky and earth that gather alike the great lines of their designs to the same distant close. There is no longer an alien sky, tossed up in unintelligible heights above a world that is subject to intelligible perspective. ”

“ And there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes.... ”

“ Not a cloud was to be seen in that flaming sky, and through that dustless atmosphere the eye could see the horizon--a horizon three times as distant as the one to which we are accustomed--with a distinctness and clarity impossible in our Terra's dust-filled air. ”

“ In childhood, we fancied ourselves walled in by the horizon, as by a glass bell, and doubted not, by distant travel, we should reach the baths of the descending sun and stars. On experiment, the horizon flies before us, and leaves us on an endless common, sheltered by no glass bell. ”

“ We must imagine the infinitude of space shrunk to a few miles, the infinitude of time contracted to a few generations. To the savage the mountains that bound the visible horizon, or the sea that stretches away to meet it, is the world's end. ”

“ On the horizon the mountains wrap themselves in mysterious light and color and seem invested with certain qualities which they lose near at hand,—as a cloud, so beautiful an object floating in the heavens, is but a fog bank once we are enveloped in it. ”

“ And in the heavens there were rivers of stars, and milky-ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple over our heads. There were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and this portion of time was but the current hour. Let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are central still. If we look into the heavens they are concave, and if we were to look into a gulf as bottomless, it would be concave also. The sky is curved downward to the earth in the horizon, because we stand on the plain. ”

“ In the morning, at sunrise, the plain often offers special effects of mirage. Objects on the horizon are two images, both straight: the silhouette of the dunes, by splitting, crowns the first ridge of a second one. ”

“ A broad ray, like a shining road, came down from a large globe of silvery light, not very high up, indeed not quite so high as the horizon—so it could not have been a new star or another moon or anything of that sort. ”

“ It was written at the Mill, it is a flower wreath gathered on the mountains.
The Horizon A youth steps forward on the road and a horizon goes forward. Sometimes slowly the horizon moves, sometimes in leaps and bounds. ”

“ The horizon, a merely necessary optical limit, a mathematical certainty, a physical injunction upon eyesight, is to youth a line on the threshold of New Worlds, a doorway to all the pleasures that the leaping heart, with wise madness, craves incessantly. ”

“ The whole arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing weathers—here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the horizon, of a low-hanging mist. ”

“ The limits of the view, in this direction, were marked by an undulating outline of bright light, as if, reversing the order of nature, numberless suns might momentarily be expected to heave above the western horizon. ”

“ If our picture plane is a sheet of glass, and is so placed that we can see the landscape behind it or a sea-view, we shall find that the distant line of the horizon passes through that point of sight, and we therefore draw a line on our picture which exactly corresponds with it, and which we call the Horizontal-line or Horizon.3 The height of the horizon then depends entirely upon the position of the eye of the spectator: if he rises, so does the horizon; if he stoops or descends to lower ground, so does the horizon follow his movements. ”

“ Now, at this moment, the blue dome of the sky, immense as it is, is but a span to the soul. The eye-glance travels to the horizon in an instant—the [Pg 274] soul-glance travels over all matter also in a moment. ”

“ The great circle of the celestial sphere everywhere equally distant from both the zenith and the nadir is the horizon. It is plain that a new zenith and new horizon are created with every movement of the observer. The facts that man is on the surface and not at the center of the earth, and that his eye is elevated above its surface, each creates another horizon. ”

“ With a horizon measured by the edge of the plain where he stands on the one side, and a horizon melting into the infinite star depths on the other, it were but to be expected that a contest would arise between the larger and the lesser outlook. On the one side, he would possess the field, concentrate his attention upon its grasses and its fruits, and lose himself in its products. ”

“ Now, one way whereby we estimate the distance of anything is by the number and extent of the intermediate objects: when therefore the moon is seen in the horizon, the variety of fields, houses, etc., together with the large prospect of the wide extended land or sea that lies between the eye and the utmost limb of the horizon, suggest unto the mind the idea of greater distance, and consequently magnify the appearance. ”

“ As we ordinarily see it, the horizon appears irregular and broken on account of the unevenness of the earth's surface, but if we are at sea, or in the midst of a great level prairie, the horizon appears as a smooth circle, everywhere equally distant from the eye. ”

“ Objects become Smaller as they Recede to say, in the foreground—are largest; the things in the middle, or middle distance, are smallest. And to explain these apparently simple facts we must exerecise our wits. You know that when you stand on the seashore and look seaward the extent of your vision is bounded by the meeting of the sea and sky, which boundary is called the horizon. The horizon is the line that follows the line of your eyes, the boundary line. ”

“ The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. ”

“ And when they came again, one set forth this: "If it seem difficult to look at life in the big, close-at-hand, because the detail mountains seem to obstruct the view; then we must get altitude, so that these mountains, no matter how near, may dwindle to mole-hills at our feet, and our horizon stretch beyond the ends of the earth." ”

“ Like the sun, which, to the poor worldling, now appears in the zenith, now in the horizon, and again is faintly reflected from the moon’s disk, and has the credit of describing an entire great circle, crossing the equinoctial and solstitial colures,—without detriment to his steadfastness or mediocrity. ”

“ But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it. ”

“ For such an observation to be exact, it is necessary that not only should the sun or stars be viewed clearly, but that a clear horizon, formed either by the ocean or by suitable clouds, should be visible. ”

“ Ice grated on the pebbles of the shore; ice floated on the sea; icy hummocks and mounds rose above its surface; and icebergs raised their pinnacles on the far-off horizon, and cut sharply into the bright blue sky.
It was cold, but it was not cheerless; for when Eda put out her head at the curtain doorway of the tent, and opened her eyes upon the magic scene, the sun’s edge rose above the horizon, as if to greet her, and sent a flood of light far and near through the spacious universe, converting the sea into glass, with islands of frosted silver on its bosom. ”

“ We can very conveniently study the conditions of observation at the poles of the earth, the equator, and some place in middle latitude, by using an ordinary terrestrial globe. 44 The wooden horizon of the globe is parallel to the horizon of a place at the top of the globe, which horizon we can represent by a wafer. ”

“ Supposing I was to tell you that it’s just Beauty that’s calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I’ve read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on—in quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon? ”

“ On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds-- a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality! ”

“ I remarked constantly, just at sunset, in these latitudes, that the eastern horizon was brilliantly illuminated with a kind of mock sunset. This in a short time disappeared, to be soon succeeded by another similar in character, but more faint. ”

“ About a quarter of an hour later the sun arose in cloudless splendour on a perfectly tranquil sea, lighted up the shores of Java, glinted over the mountains of Sumatra, and flooded, as with a golden haze, the forests of Krakatoa—emulating the volcanic fires in gilding the volumes of smoke that could be seen rolling amid fitful mutterings from Perboewatan, until the hermit’s home sank from view in the western horizon. ”