nd the banks of a high beach to
get their land line cutting against the sky, and receiving a more
strange delight from this than from the sight of the ocean: I am not
sure that this feeling is common to all children, (or would be common if
they were all in circumstances admitting it), but I have ascertained it
to be frequent among those who possess the most vivid sensibilities for
nature; and I am certain that the modification of it, which belongs to
our after years, is common to all, the love, namely, of a light
distance appearing over a comparatively dark horizon. This I have tested
too frequently to be mistaken, by offering to indifferent spectators
forms of equal abstract beauty in half tint, relieved, the one against
dark sky, the other against a bright distance. The preference is
invariably given to the latter, and it is very certain that this
preference arises not from any supposition of there being greater truth
in this than the other, for the same preference is unhesitatingly
accorded to the same effect in nature herself. Whatever beauty there may
result from effects of light on foreground objects, from the dew of the
grass, the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the birch trunk, or the
fair daylight hues of darker things, (and joyfulness there is in all of
them), there is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper
feeling of the beautiful, the light of the declining or breaking day,
and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch-fires in the green
sky of the horizon; a deeper feeling, I say, not perhaps more acute, but
having more of spiritual hope and longing, less of animal and present
life, more manifest, invariably, in those of more serious and determined
mind, (I use the word serious, not as being opposed to cheerful, but to
trivial and volatile;) but, I think, marked and unfailing even in those
of the least thoughtful dispositions. I am willing to let it rest on the
determination of every reader, whether the pleasure which he has
received from these effects of calm and luminous distance be not the
most singular and memorable of which he has been conscious, whether all
that is dazzling in color, perfect in form, gladdening in expression, be
not of evanescent and shallow appealing, when compared with the still
small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or the scarlet
arch of dawn over the dark, troublous-edged sea.

Sec. 5. Whereto this instinct is traceable.

Let us try