THE SKY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 452, 30 March 1912, Page 7

THE SKY.

A SWISS IMPRESSION. Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as far iway ? By no means. Look at the clouds and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded lustre of their magnificent rolling. They are meant to be beheld from afar ; they were shaped for their place high above your head , approach them and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce iragments of thunderous vapour. Look at the crest of the Alp from ;he far-away plains over which its light is cast, whence human souls iiave communed with it by their myriads. It was built for its place in the far-off sky ; approach it, and as the sound of the voice of man rlies a way about its foundations, and the tide of human life is met at last by the eternal "Here shall thy waves be stayed," the glory of its aspect iades into blanched fearfulness, its purple walls are rent into grisly rocks, its silver fretwork saddened into wasting snow ; the stormbrands of ages are on its breast, the ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment. If you desire to perceive the great harmonics of the form of a rocky mountain, you must not ascend upon its sides. All there is disorder and accident, or seems so. Retire from it, and as your eye commands it more and more, you see the ruined mountain world with a wider glance ; behold ! dim sympathies begin to busy themselves in the disjointed mass ; line binds itself into stealthy fellowship with line ; group by group the helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies ; new captains of hosts, and masses of battalions, becomes visible one by one ; and far away answers of foot to foot and of bone to bone, until the powerless is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap can now be spared from the mystic whole.—Ruskin.