tances from my own old and favorite subject, the ordering
of the clouds in a beautiful sunset, which corresponds to a painter's
invention of them, or the ordering of the colors on a bird's wing, or of
the radiations of a crystal of hoarfrost or of sapphire, concerning any
of which matters men, so called of science, are necessarily and forever
silent, because the distribution of colors in spectra and the relation
of planes in crystals are final and causeless facts, _orders_, that is
to say, not _laws_. And more than this, the infidel temper which is
incapable of perceiving this spiritual beauty has an instant and
constant tendency to delight in the reverse of it, so that practically
its investigation is always, by preference, of forms of death or disease
and every state of disorder and dissolution, the affectionate analysis
of vice in modern novels being a part of the same science. And, to keep
to my own special field of study--the order of clouds,--there is a
grotesquely notable example of the connection between infidelity and the
sense of ugliness in a paper in the last _Contemporary Review_, in which
an able writer, who signs Vernon Lee, but whose personal view or purpose
remains to the close of the essay inscrutable, has rendered with
considerable acuteness and animation the course of a dialogue between
one of the common modern men about town who are the parasites of their
own cigars and two more or less weak and foolish friends of hesitatingly
adverse instincts: the three of them, however, practically assuming
their own wisdom to be the highest yet attained by the human race; and
their own diversion on the mountainous heights of it being by the aspect
of a so-called "preposterous" sunset, described in the following
terms:--

* * * * *

A brilliant light, which seemed to sink out of the landscape all its
reds and yellows, and with them all life; bleaching the yellowing
cornfields and brown heath; but burnishing into demoniac[22] energy of
color the pastures and oak woods, brilliant against the dark sky, as if
filled with green fire.

Along the roadside the poppies, which an ordinary sunset makes flame,
were quite extinguished, like burnt-out embers; the yellow hearts of the
daisies were quite lost, merged into their shining white petals. And,
striking against the windows of the old black and white checkered farm
(a ghastly skeleton in this light), it made them not flare, nay, not
red