Sole

“ One bird, a thrush, embroidered the silence with cheery notes, making the solitude familiar and sweet, while the solemn monotone of the stream sifting through the woods seemed like the very voice of God, humanized, terrestrialized, and entering one's heart as to a home prepared for it. Go where we will, all the world over, we seem to have been there before. ”

“ Wherever Nature's sway extends, The fragrant balm of love descends, His golden pinions quiver; If 'twere not Venus' eye that gleams Upon me in the moon's soft beams, In sunlit hill or river,— If 'twere not Venus smiles on me From yonder bright and starry sea, Not stars, not sun, not moonbeams sweet, Could make my heart with rapture beat. 'Tis love alone that smilingly Peers forth from Nature's blissful eye, As from a mirror ever! ”

“ I have seen a mind enclosed above fresh air and sunshine, frolicking on its own strength, the elasticity of its thought lassoing all the stars assembled. Golden points of light caught in this sand with an oval sun marching blue legions across the sky bring more harmony than all the stars assembled. ”

“ Men and women who had never enjoyed a sunset, a tree, or a flower, who had never appreciated the graciousness or meaning of the yellow sunlight that flecked their homely doorways, or the tenderness of a midsummer's night, to whose moonlight they bared their shirt-sleeves or their tulle dresses, came from thousands of miles away to calculate the height of this rock, to observe the depth of this chasm, to remark upon the enormous size of this unsightly tree, and to believe with ineffable self-complacency that they really admired Nature. ”

“ Its soul is the spirit of light—of sunlight, of moonlight, of starlight—which plays ceaselessly across the face of the landscape, veiling it at night in mystery and shadow, painting it at dawn with the colors of the pearl-shell, and bathing it at mid-day in a luminous glory. ”

“ Around, are spread out on every hand the wonders of creation. The air, the earth, the sea, and the sky, are all teeming with beauty and adorned with loveliness. The setting sun sheds on the one horizon its stream of glowing light, and the pale moon appears in silvery brightness on the other. ”

“ Nothing could be more marked than the contrast between the earth and the heavens; for, while the former presented the dreary view that we have described, a warm and invigorating sun was dispensing his heats from a sky that contained but a solitary cloud, and through an atmosphere that softened the colors of the sensible horizon until it shone like a sea of blue. ”

“ The blue sky overhead flecked with the lightest of summer clouds, the buoyant air, the sun-steeped landscape, the general brightness and cheerfulness of the day, impressed us with an indefinable but very real joyousness and light-heartedness. ”

“ The sun had risen without mist and set in a sky without a cloud, seeming, as it sank, to draw with it all the colour from the heavens, as if it had cast a golden net in the morning and now drew it home again behind the hill. ”

“ The sun, whose concentrated glare dwarfs the earth into a restless mote of dust, had sunk behind the forest, and the diffused light from an opal sky seemed to cast upon a world without shadows and without brilliance the illusion of a calm and pensive greatness. ”

“ Perchance in sunset's golden pale
He listens to the nightingale,
Amid the perfumed air.
Come, he has fled; you are not you,
And I no more am I;
Delight is changeful as the hue
Of heaven, that is no longer blue
In yonder sunset sky.
ELLE.
Nay, if we seek we shall not find,
If we knock none openeth;
Nay, see, the sunset fades behind
The mountains, and the cold night wind
Blows from the house of Death.
ROMANCE.
My Love dwelt in a Northern land. ”

“ When the little hopeful leaves peep out so fresh and green, so pure and bright, like young lives pushing shyly out into the bustling world; when the fruit-tree blossoms, pink and white, like village maidens in their Sunday frocks, hide each whitewashed cottage in a cloud of fragile splendor; and the cuckoo's note upon the breeze is wafted through the woods! And summer, with its deep dark green and drowsy hum—when the rain-drops whisper solemn secrets to the listening leaves and the twilight lingers in the lanes! ”

“ Rose, like a mountain drifted, high in air.
It rose! It rose! It covered all the coast;
Under its wrinkled belly rang the shells;
Its monstrous feet, its big toes hard and scaled,
Were spread out heavy on the shingles wet. ”

“ Life must have been noble and solemn to those free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the human race, walking hand in hand with God under the great sky. They lived in sunkissed tents amid the lowing herds. They took their simple wants from the loving hand of Nature. They toiled and talked and thought; and the great earth rolled around in stillness, not yet laden with trouble and wrong.
Those days are past now. The quiet childhood of Humanity, spent in the far-off forest glades and by the murmuring rivers, is gone forever; and human life is deepening down to manhood amid tumult, doubt, and hope. ”

“ See the bright blaze that issues from the verge of the waters! and now the sun himself appears, and all is life, or seems to be; for as the influence of the Divinity is to the universe, so is that of the sun to the things of this world. ”

“ He shows this in the wonderful sky effects above it. They are things of beauty. If clouds gather, he tips them with rainbow colors,—brilliant reds and oranges, purples and greens, melting into delicious pinks, soft lilacs, and grays. The sunset there is a glorious sight never to be forgotten. ”

“ Looking upon the world as a mere spectacle of beauty, I find its attractions increasing. I notice more than I ever did the gorgeous phantasmagoria of sunsets, the magical changes of clouds, the endless varieties of form and color in the flowers of garden and field, and the shell-flowers of the sea. Something of tenderness mingles with the admiration excited by all this fair array of earth, like the lingering, farewell gaze we bestow on scenes from which we are soon to part. ”

“ When at last the full moon rose over the Beacon Mountains there was not a cloud above the horizon, and Nature, in all her shower-gemmed and June-clad loveliness, was like a radiant beauty lost in revery. ”

“ We seem in that hour to be standing by some unseen death-bed, and in the swaying of the elms we hear the sigh of the dying day.
A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. ”

“ Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth. ”

“ The sky has been wonderful, with every form of cloud in every condition of light and shade; the sun has continually appeared through breaks in the cloudy heavens from time to time, brilliantly illuminating some field of pack, some steep-walled berg, or some patch of bluest sea. ”

“ Just watch on some summer morning how the early rays of the sun arouse the slumbering rose from its blissful dreams, and remember that the rose responds because its body and soul are tuned to the melodies which the glorious sunlight is pouring into its enchanted ear. Remember also that what I have just described is not merely a flowery figure of speech, but that it is a concise description of a beautiful physical relationship, which science has discovered in the life of the rose. ”

“ The rainbow expands its radiant circle, the rose and lily sparkle in the sunshine; the green fields and golden grain diversify the landscape by their vivid colors. But there are no colors; there is no light; there are only undulations in the air that set the optic nerve vibrating. ”

“ During this time, outside, the hands of Nature had been at work, and now the whole sky was robed in luminous, fleecy gray, strewn with white stars, and crowned with the radiant half-moon, which shed silver beams over the whole earth. ”

“ When the leaves fall, we see more clearly the rock which their short-lived greenness in its pride veiled. When the many-hued and ever-shifting clouds are swept out of the sky by the wind, the sun that lent them all their colour shines the more brightly. ”

“ Now it glasses only what is high or beautiful in nature—the stars or the leafy banks. The wind that ruffles it, is clothed with perfumes; the rivulet that swells it, descends from the everlasting mountains, or is formed by the rains of Heaven. ”

“ But Nature’s poetry was more beautiful than man’s. The wind and the beam loved the rose so well that they made the rose—or rather, the rose took the wind and the beam, and built up out of them, by her own inner life, her exquisite texture, hue, and fragrance. ”

“ To live on such an earth with such a sky above! Looking at the sky was like looking into a vast crystal. Farther and farther into space her gaze seemed to penetrate, and presently her soul began to follow her gaze. ”

“ The sunlight falls on the hand; the light remains without on the surface, but its influence enters the very being. This sense of absorbing something from earth, and flower, and sunlight is like hovering on the verge of a great truth. ”

“ If one has a sunset view showing fine clouds, place a faint rose-color or violet-tinted paper back of the sky, and when the lantern is lighted the colors are like those of a real sunset, the shadows and high lights in the clouds, making the different tones and shades of color. ”

“ The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon—and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like eternity.
All things rejoiced beneath the sun; the weeds,
The river, and the cornfields, and the reeds ”

“ Do you observe that glorious sun-beam glassing itself in the mirror of the falling shower, thereby painting on the clouds the many-coloured rainbow, which, though frail it appears to you, cannot be produced without two of Nature's grandest elements—light and water? ”

“ Trees and shrubs stand out clearly, and their shadows stand out blackly under the rays of the serene silver moon that swings high in the sky. Everything is transformed by the kindly rays into things of beauty, and sometimes I stand and gaze away across the paddocks bathed in the silver light and marvel at the stillness. ”

“ A dark cloud, whose edges rise curve upon curve, hangs in the sky, fringed with bright white light, for the sun is behind it, and long, narrow streamers of light radiate from the upper part like the pointed rays of an antique crown. ”

“ When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and the flower knows the sunlight for which it was made and opens its fragrance and beauty ”

“ Our efforts are of no avail when we seek to turn his attention to wild roses, or to the fact that both ocean and sky are already about as rosy as possible—the one with stars, the other with dulse, and foam, and wild light. ”

“ Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed from me. ”

“ Out of the sane, silent, beauteous miracles that envelope and fuse me—trees, water, grass, sunlight, and early frost—the one I am looking at most to-day is the sky. It has that delicate, transparent blue, peculiar to autumn, and the only clouds are little or larger white ones, giving their still and spiritual motion to the great concave. ”

“ And clouds and woods and arid rocks appear
Dissolving in the sun's own atmosphere
And vast circumference of light, whose slow
Transfiguration—glow and after-glow—
Turns twilight earth to a more luminous sphere. ”

“ I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day been painting the Earth;—and when I look round a little in our picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains ”

“ However, I am disposed, on the whole, to suppose the gloaming or dusk to suit our tales better—that light which, for some time after the sun himself has sunk out of sight, continues to illumine the skies in these latitudes, and to tip the mountains and the clouds with colours which are now and then of indescribable beauty. ”

“ She had never fully learned how God's love, like the sunlight, could shine upon and brighten the thorny, rocky way, and cause the thorns to blossom, and delicate fragrant flowers to grow in the crevices and bloom in shaded nooks among the sharp stones. ”

“ By some trick of light and shade she seemed the heart of the sunset, a golden, glowing creature of soft, warm flesh through which an ardent soul quivered and palpitated with vague yearnings and inarticulate desires. ”

“ With ray-like florets round a disk-like face.
Men nobly call by many a name the Mount,
As over many a land of theirs its large
Calm steadfast front, like a triumphal targe
Is reared, and still with old names, fresh names vie,
Each to its proper praise and own account:
Men call the Flower, the Sunflower, sportively. ”

“ Everywhere we have the mellow and advancing light that precedes the appearance of the sun--the shifting hues of the sky--that pearly softness that seems to have been invented to make us love the works of God's hand and the warm glow of the brilliant sun ”