Sunbeam

“ And yet a single sunbeam, which no one can paint or define, looking so innocent and colorless, is found to consist of seven colors, and will penetrate the deepest darkness and reveal all existing objects in their proper and actual form and color. ”

“ One solitary sunbeam found its way down, and played like a goldfish in the water.
From my childhood, I have loved to gaze into a spring. The water filled a circular basin, small, but deep, and set round with stones, some of which were covered with slimy moss, the others naked, and of variegated hue, reddish, white, and brown. The bottom was covered with coarse sand, which sparkled in the lonely sunbeam, and seemed to illuminate the spring with an unborrowed light. ”

“ Wherever the Sunbeam falls we find life and motion; elsewhere, death and stillness. Under its influence the seed germinates, the stem sends forth branches, the leaf bursts from the bud, the flower unfolds its petals, and the fruit grows and ripens. ”

“ A mysterious twilight encompasses us, which serves to intensify the radiance of the occasional sunbeam as it falls on a glossy palm-leaf, or on a large bunch of purple orchid-flowers. Splendid trunks, some of them from twenty to thirty feet in diameter, rise like so many pillars supporting the dense green vault of foliage ”

“ But they have other ornaments than the blossoms which they themselves unfold. Their tendrils are the favourite perches of many of the most beautiful birds of the forest, living flowers which far surpass those of the plant in beauty and charm. Sometimes it happens that a sudden flash, like a sun-ray reflected from a smooth, bright surface, catches the eye and guides it to the spot from which it emanated. The shimmer is indeed a sunbeam—a sunbeam reflected [Pg 214] from the glossy plumage of a metallic starling, now in one direction, now in another, with every movement. ”

“ Early in the morning, before a single sunbeam has illumined the dark deep twilight of the sky, they rise in solemn majesty, the icy outline being distinctly defined, while they stand out from the grey atmosphere around—anon a tint of amber spreads over them, and, divested of their chilling grandeur, they come out warm and glowing: again they shew like cold bright silver in the sun, while in the evening they are all crimson with the rose that flushes through the sky: a single mile, nay, even a single turn of the road, sufficing to invest them with new shapes and new peculiarities. ”

“ It is the sun which has bleached the tablecloth to that snowy whiteness. The sun has given those bright colors which look so pretty in the girls’ dresses. With how much significance can we say and feel that light is pleasant to the eye, and what prettier name than Little Sunbeam can we have for the darling child who makes our home so bright? ”

“ They had not yet half finished their mixing, when all of a sudden she noticed a soft buzzing sound, like the humming of bees, but all in beautiful melody; and then she saw the Sunbeam full of sprites of every [193] hue like living flowers. They were the genii of the flowers, and they wore the very forms of the flowers, their bright petals making so many wings, and they came and poured each its own perfumed nectar into the confection, giving it a flavour such as no turron, of earth at least, ever possessed before. ”

“ The sunbeam, however, does what our wisest chemistry cannot do: it takes the burned out ashes and makes them anew into green wood; it takes the close and breathed out air, and makes it sweet and fit to breathe by means of the plant, whose food is the same as our poison. ”

“ The sunbeam—the finger of God—that reaches across the unknown abysses of the universe in a moment, bringing life out of death, and clothing the objects around us with their many-colored dyes, has extracted this condition of everlasting permanence from a preëxisting transient order of things. ”

“ And late experiments on the sunbeam showed that dark substances imprison the rays,—these absorbing more and delivering less. The more of sun, so much the more of soul; the less of sun, of passion more, and the strange fire. ”

“ The sunbeam may deposit itself in a tree, and thus secure to itself life in embodied form for hundreds of years. But in order that this may be, the sun must send his beams to warm and nourish the tree all the days of its life. ”

“ It is probable, however, that while you were perfectly familiar with the idea of the atmosphere carrying clouds of dust, on occasions, you never thought of the atmosphere being constantly loaded with dust, which is constantly being deposited, and constantly renewed. This sunbeam has made the fact visible. It has lighted up the tiny cloud of dust, which we see to be restlessly whirling. ”

“ These marks are not visible until a special process has been applied, but then the sunbeam can be made to tell its story, and it will disclose to us much of the nature of the constitution of the great luminary.
We regard the sun's light as colourless, just as we speak of water as tasteless, but both of those expressions relate rather to our own feelings than to anything really characteristic of water or of sunlight. We regard the sunlight as colourless because it forms, as it were, the background on which all other colours are depicted. ”

“ What a wonderful contrivance is each stalk for gathering sunlight and moisture! Water constitutes eighty per cent. of that vast growth! The forces of the sunbeam, which are locked up in it, will be surrendered during the coming winter, to sustain and invigorate man and beast. ”

“ We have now learnt something of the distance, the size, the light, and the heat of the sun - the great source of the sunbeams. But we are as yet no nearer the answer to the question, What is a sunbeam? how does the sun touch our earth? ”

“ There could be no vegetable or animal life without the sunbeam, yet when we have explained or accounted for the growth of a tree in terms of the chemistry and physics of the sunbeam, do we not have to figure to ourselves something in the tree that avails itself of this chemistry, that uses it and profits by it? ”

“ Where a sunbeam enters, every particle of dust becomes visible, and a palpable interruption to the sight, so that a transverse sunbeam is a real obstacle to the vision, you cannot see things clearly through it. ”

“ It is impossible thus to trace the path of a sunbeam through our atmosphere without feeling a desire to know its nature, by what power it traverses the immensity of space, and the various modifications it undergoes at the surfaces and in the interior of terrestrial substances. ”

“ When the sunbeam, after traversing obliquely the dense and darkened portion of the cloud-formation, has directly cast its own orb on some cloud, the radiance is then reflected back from what is moist and shining, and the result is a bending and return, as it were, of the light upon itself. For flame-like flashings are so constituted that if they fall on any smooth surface they are refracted on themselves ”

“ From these experiments we learn that the sunbeam is an ethereal band of different rays, which may be separated by the instrumentality of the prism. We learn that heat is less refracted, or bent, by the glass than the other powers, as we find it but slightly thrown out of the right line which the beam would have taken had it not been interrupted by the prism. "We discover that light is subject to greater refraction as the seven colours are thrown upon the screen above the maximum point of the heat rays. ”

“ The solar influences, which regulate, and possibly determine, every physical force with which we are acquainted, are active in effecting an actual change of state in matter. The sunbeam of the morning falls on the solid earth, and its influence is felt to the very centre. The mountain-top catches the first ray of light, and its base, still wrapt in mists and darkness, is disturbed by the irradiating power. ”

“ A sun ray is a magical thing: we connect it in our fancy with the most ethereal of possible creations. Yet in its action on matter it produces colour; it separates the particles of solid masses farther from each other, [Pg 167] and it breaks up some of the strongest forces of chemical affinity. To modern science is entirely due the knowledge we have gained of the marvellous powers of the sunbeam; and it has rendered us familiar with phenomena, to which the incantation scenes of the Cornelius Agrippas of the dark ages were but ill-contrived delusions, and their magic mirrors poor instruments. ”

“ What work do the sunbeams do for us? They do two things,—they give us light and heat. It is by means of them alone that we see anything.
When the room was dark you could not distinguish the table, the chairs, or even the walls of the room. Why? Because they had no light waves to send to your eye. But as the sunbeams began to pour in at the window, the waves played upon the things in the room ”

“ On a grander scale than in the sunbeam traversing a room, we witness the same fact in the effect represented in Fig. 189, where the sun, concealed from direct observation, is seen to send through openings in the clouds, beams that reveal their paths by lighting up the particles of haze or mist contained in the atmosphere. It is not the air itself which is rendered visible ”

“ Now, there are many of these dark heat rays in a sunbeam, and it is they that do most of the work in the world. It is the heat waves that make the air hot and light, and so cause it to rise, and make winds and air currents; and these again give rise to ocean currents. It is these dark rays, again, that strike upon the land, and give it the warmth which enables plants to grow. It is they also that keep up the warmth in our own bodies, both by coming to us directly from the sun, and also in a very roundabout way through plants. ”

“ Such are some of the things found in the dust of a sunbeam, and you will probably have been too much astonished at some of the facts to have made the reflection that among all these objects not a single egg has been named. A few spores of plants are, indeed, frequently found. Knowing that many plants are fertilised by the agency of the wind, one expects to find pollen grains abundant. ”

“ We have hitherto considered light as something, whether substance or affection of substance, of one single kind. The fact is, however, that light, as it comes to us from the Sun, is not homogeneous, but consists of various kinds, mixed together in different proportions, which being refrangible in different degrees by the same medium, may be exhibited very clearly by causing a Sunbeam to pass through a prism and fall on a sheet of paper placed in a proper position or the wall of a room. ”

“ As a ray of sunbeams, a particle of sand or sunstone, shine brightly in sunshine; but the sun and moon also do not shine even as conspicuously as those particles, before the great glory of their Maker. ”

“ Is it not strange that there is really no such thing as color in the leaf, the table, the coat, or the geranium; that we see them of different colors because they send back only certain-colored waves to our eye?
So far we have spoken only of light; but hold your hand in the sun, and feel the heat of the sunbeams, and then consider if the waves of heat do not do work also. There are many waves in a sunbeam which move too slowly to make us see light when they hit our eye; but we can feel them as heat, though we cannot see them as light. ”

“ We said in the last lecture that without the sunbeams the earth would be cold, dark, and frost-ridden. With sunbeams, but without air, it would indeed have burning heat, side by side with darkness and ice, but it could have no soft light. our planet might look beautiful to others, as the moon does to us, but it could have comparatively few beauties of its own. With the sunbeams and the air, we see it has much to make it beautiful. But a third worker is wanted before our planet can revel in activity and life. ”

“ Rays of light are emitted, under ordinary circumstances, in direct lines; they will not pass through a bent tube, nor turn a corner. Bodies through which light passes freely are called transparent, and those which do not admit it to pass, opaque. When light falls upon an opaque surface a portion is absorbed and another portion reflected; when the reflected portion is considerable the surface appears white, and black when the portion is inappreciable.
We have said that a sunbeam consists of three great principles, namely, light, heat, and actinism. ”

“ The heat and the light then expended so liberally by the sun were seized by the leaves of flourishing plants, and were stored away in their stems and foliage. Thus it is that the ancient sunbeams have been preserved in our coal-beds for uncounted thousands of years. When we put a lump of coal on our fire this evening, and when it sends forth a grateful warmth and cheerful light, it but reproduces for our benefit some of that store of preserved sunbeams of which our earth holds so large a treasure. ”

“ Queerest fact of all, it appeared to have some mysterious affinity with the sunshine, for when a stray white argosy of cloud came drifting over the azure and obscured for a minute the glad light, this full, sonorous note died suddenly away, rising as swiftly again to its old power and volume when the sunbeams glowed back once more over the spacious garden, and over the riverside willows that shed their gold of dying leafage with every breath of the soft south wind. ”

“ But it was shown in the preceding chapter that sunbeams, or the appearance § 12. His use of the cirrus in expressing mist.of them, are always sharper in their edge in proportion as the air is more misty, as they are most defined in a room where there is most dust flying about in it. Consequently, in the vignette we have been just noticing, where transparency is to be given, though there is a blaze of light, its beams are never edged; a tendency to rays is visible, but you cannot in any part find a single marked edge of a rising sunbeam, the sky is merely more flushed in one place than another. ”