, nor utter'd cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
"She must weep or she will die."

Then they praised him, soft and low,
Call'd him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept,
Took the face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee--
Like summer tempest came her tears--
"Sweet my child, I live for thee."

--_Alfred Tennyson_

See Introduction, p. 6.

* * * * *

THE SKY

From "Modern Painters"

1. It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the
sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the
sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking
to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is
just the part in which we least attend to her.

2. There are not many of her other works in which some more material
or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by
every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the
sky might, so far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or
thereabouts, a great ugly black rain-cloud were brought up over the
blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till
next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew.

3. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives,
when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture,
glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant
principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is
all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every
man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of
beauty, has this doing for him constantly.

4. The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few;
it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them,
he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be
always with them; but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not
"too bright, nor good, for human nature's daily food"; it is fitted in
all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart,
for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes a