The Thames Star. Resurrexi. FRIDAY, JULY 1, 1904. AESTHETICS OF THE SKY.

Thames Star, Volume XXXXI, Issue 10651, 1 July 1904, Page 2

The Thames Star. Resurrexi. FRIDAY, JULY 1, 1904. AESTHETICS OF THE SKY.

An article under 1 the above heading, by Mr Richard Le Gallienne, in EDarper's Magazine, contains: some fine word-painting: "There is no emotion of -whatever kind that you cannot, one time or another, find expressed for you in the sky. If you are sad a.nd lonely, and your heart almost breaking with the fine drawn music of re~ ; gret, look at yonder sky. You are not so sad and lonely as that. Why, you almost forget your own sorrow as you gaze on that exquisite >sky. Wouild you have iSiilence, would you dream of a peace made' of mother-of-pearl i and the evening star; there again is the sky I And would you toe pure, and firm of faith, and free as the boundless air—look at the 'Sky! O!n tho other hand, did you- ever see. a face so wicked a® is sometimes 1 tlh© face of the sky, so sinister with hushed menace, so livid with ambushed evil, so truculently brutal with thunder? There is nothing that you can dream of or dread that is not pictured in the sky with a fore© arid intensity such as elsewhere you must >seek in direanis Black continents of monster* jawed with fire; lagoons of shining ether; v star, safe and silent, like' a candle burning by a sleeping child j floating islands rimmed with, silver; bergs, of saffron fire drifting in the solar sea; gardens and golden gates and towers of snow ', armies with dramsl of darkness and terrible spears j a dotvle all alone in heaven; bosoms filled witlh roses; cataracts of moonshine falling from oloudl to diaud'j peacoctbs made of istara; gonfalons oi flaming 1 dew; and battlements thronged with unearthly faces. There is, indeed, no such picture book as this picture book of the clouds; 'but it is not by such concrete shapes of fancy as these that the art of the sky seriously takes hold of us—these merely imitative, one might say punning simulacra, accidental and unmeaning as faces seen in the fire; it is rather ibjy pictorial moods of expressiveness too fluid to be cialled symbolic, great abstract schemes of modulated radiauue, that, like isome of the igreatest pictures, mean nothing ;but—'Eternity, Eternity —or some other words hardly less simply profound; in its power. in fact, of c xpressiug tho trauceliko dreams of the spirit, moods' of the imagination, and even states of the mind. Perhaps the strangest thing nibomt this art of the sky is its power over tho soul. With all its pomp and magnificence of color, it is. never sensual. Its glories and its revelries, thonngGi (bright as a, Persian carpet and Dkmysiac as the feast of Belshazzar, seem somehow purged of earthly significance. Addressing the mere mortal eye with smc/h prismatic eloqiVendq, their time, nfc-isaigo .seems somehow to appeal to our immortal part. The ibeaitty of the earth too often demoralises, like the beauty of some sensual painter, but no one ever was demoralised by looking at the iky. Its pictures are like those of tome Hebrew prophet, or those of the Booik of Revelation. They have all tho colored magnificence of earth, yet they mean nothing buit heaven. There is .something mysteriously pure altoout this artist, of tjhe sky.'"