has enterprise, deep quiet droops
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour."

As for the emotional value of the universal span of the sky, its
power to tranquillise by a sense of vast harmony and unity,
Christina Rossetti knew it:

"Heaven o'erarches you and me,
And all earth's gardens and her graves.
Look up with me, until we see
The day break and the shadows flee.
What though to-night wrecks you and me
If so to-morrow saves?"

Here, as is almost inevitable, the thought of the expanse is
associated with the alternate coming on of darkness and the
breaking of the dawn; but the change and alternation gains its
unity and ultimate significance from the all-inclusiveness of the
sky as the abiding element.

Walt Whitman brings out another aspect of this subtle but
powerful influence. He addresses the sky: "Hast Thou, pellucid,
in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine? (Ah, the
physical shatter and troubled spirit of me the last three years.)
And dost Thou subtly, mystically now drip it through the air
invisibly upon me?"

In similar mood Jefferies writes: "I turned to the blue heaven
over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite colour and
sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky
drew my soul towards it, and there it rested, for pure colour is
rest of heart."

And thus "the witchery of the soft blue sky" launches us
naturally into the subject of the sky as colour; and not of blue
only, but of that vast range of hues and gradations which
display their beauty and their glory in the four quarters of
heaven during each move onwards of the earth from sunrise to
sunrise. Tennyson's description is vivid and splendid. The
shipwrecked Enoch Arden is waiting for a sail, and sees

"Every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise."

But of special interest here is the fact that the blue of the vault
is never mentioned--only the scarlet shafts of sunrise and the
blaze. Whether this omission was intentional or not, may be
uncertain.

But it brings to mind the strange fact that the perception and
naming of this blue are compa