a prison. No amount of beauty in a nearer
form will make us content to remain with it, so long as we are shut down
to it alone, nor is any form so cold but that we may look upon it with
kindness, so that it rise against the infinite light of hope beyond.
Gaze into Vernet's pictures: always sunrises or sunsets, calms or
tempests, nights of moonlight, misty horizons in which it is quite
impossible to distinguish the limiting lines--the infinite is always
suggested in them: hence their hold upon the popular imagination.

It is really wonderful in how many ways this feeling appeals to us; it
seems to be the background of our whole finite being. Saint Pierre says:

'The reason of the pleasure we experience in the sight of an
immense tree, springs from the feeling of the infinite which is
excited in us by its pyramidal form. The decrease in the different
tiers of its branches; the infinitesimal gradations in its shades
of green, always lighter at the extremity of the tree than in the
rest of its foliage--give it an elevation apparently without limit.
We experience the same sensations in the horizontal lines of
landscapes, where we see row after row of hills unrolling one
behind the other, until the last appears to melt into the blue of
the distant heavens. Nature seems to love to produce the same
effect upon extended plains or rolling prairies through the means
of the mists and vapors so frequently rising from the bosoms of
lakes and rivers. Sometimes these mists hang like curtains along
the skirts of isolated forests, sometimes they rise like armed
columns, and move in serried ranks along the beds of rivers;
sometimes they are gray, gloomy, and motionless, sometimes moving
with startling rapidity; their sombre hues changing into glowing
rose, or penetrated and permeated with the glittering and golden
light of the sun. Under all these shifting aspects they open for us
perspective after perspective of the infinite into the infinite
itself.'

Indeed nature seems never wearied in her varied suggestions of the
infinite. Ruskin says, Is not the pleasure we receive from the effects
of calm and luminous distance at the hour of sunset and sunrise among
the most memorable and singular of which we are conscious; and is not
all that is dazzling in color, perfect in form, gladdening in
expression, of evanescent and shallow appealin