Читать книгу Idylls of the Sea, and Other Marine Sketches онлайн

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Swinging through the clear sky, one hundred feet above the little stretch of white deck that looks so strangely narrow and circumscribed, the period of two hours assigned for a spell is often spent in strange meditations. For all the circumstances are favourable to absolute detachment from ordinary affairs. A man feels there cut off from the world, a temporary visitor to a higher sphere, from whose serene altitude the petty environment of daily life appears separated by a vast gulf. Rising to that calm plane in the shimmering pearly twilight of a tropical dawn, he is enabled to view, as from no other standpoint, the daily mystery and miracle of the sunrise. For he forgets the tiny microcosm below, involuntarily looking upward into the infinite azure until his mind becomes consciously akin to eternal verities, and sheds for a brief space the gross hamperings of fleshly needs and longings. At such a time, especially if the heavens be one stainless concave of blue, the advent of the new day is so overwhelming in its glory that the soul is flooded with a sense of celestial beauty unutterable. Beautiful and glorious indeed are the changing tints and varying hues of early dawn upon the fleecy fields of cloud, but the very changeableness of the wondrous scene is unfavourable to the simple settlement of wondering, worshipping thought induced by the birth of unclouded light. At first there appears upon the eastern edge of the vast, sharply-defined circle of the horizon, that by a familiar optical illusion seems to bound a sapphire concavity of which the spectator is the centre, a tremulous, silky paling of the tender blue belonging to the tropical night. The glowing stars grow fainter, dimmer, ceasing to coruscate like celestial jewels studding the soft, dark canopy of the sky. Unlingering, the palpitating sheen spreads zenithwards, presently sending before it as heralds wide bars of radiance tinted with blends of colour not to be reproduced by the utmost skill of the painter. Before their triumphal advent the great cone of the zodiacal light, which, like a stupendous obelisk rising from the mere shadow of some ineffable central glow, to which the gigantic sun itself is but a pale star, has dominated the moonless hours, fades and vanishes. Far reaching, these heavenly messengers gild the western horizon, but when the eye returns to their source it has become “a sea of glass mingled with fire,”—a fire which consumes not, and, while glowing with unfathomable splendour, has yet a mildness that permits the eye to search its innermost glories unfalteringly and with inexpressible delight.