The Sky

BY JOHN RUSKIN

John Ruskin (1819-1900). An English author best known as an art critic, though he wrote much on political economy and other subjects. Among his works are "Modern Painters," "The Stones of Venice," "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," "Sesame and Lilies," "The Crown of Wild Olive," and "Queen of the Air."

"Modern Painters," from which this selection is taken, is a treatise on landscape painting, which contains many eloquent passages on art, nature, and other subjects.

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 5 him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

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 organiza10 tion; 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 15 and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day in 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. The noblest scenes of the earth can be 5 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; " 10 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 awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost 15 spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential.

And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a sub- 20 ject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which 25 we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness or a glance of admiration.

If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we 30 turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena

do we speak of? One says it has been wet; and another, it has been windy; and another, it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white moun5 tains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits until they melted and moldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and 10 the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves?

All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, 15 not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire; but in the still small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed 20 through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual,- that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood, things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, 25 which are never wanting, and never repeated, which are to be found always, yet each found but once; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught and the blessing of beauty given.

These are what the artist of highest aim must study; 30 it is these, by the combination of which his ideal is to be created; these, of which so little notice is ordinarily taken

by common observers, that I fully believe, little as people in general are concerned with art, more of their ideas of sky are derived from pictures than from reality, and that if we could examine the conception formed in the minds of most educated persons when we talk of clouds, it would 5 frequently be found composed of fragments of blue and white reminiscences of the old masters.

Ca pricious (prish'us): fanciful; changeable. Chǎs'tise ment: punishment. În să pid'i tỷ: dullness; weakness. Ap'à thỹ: indifference; want of feeling. Un ob tru'sive: not forward or intrusive.

Legend of the Moor's Legacy

BY WASHINGTON IRVING

Washington Irving (1783-1859): An American author. He wrote several biographies, of which the best are the "Life of Washington," and "Life of Columbus." Irving is best known by the charming sketches and stories comprised in the volumes entitled, "The Sketch Book," and "Tales of a Traveler," "Bracebridge Hall," and "The Alhambra." The "Legend of the Moor's Legacy" is one of the Spanish tales in "The Alhambra."

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Just within the fortress of the Alhambra, in front of the royal palace, is a broad, open esplanade, called the Place or Square of the Cisterns, so called from being 10 undermined by reservoirs of water, hidden from sight, which have existed from the time of the Moors.

corner of this esplanade is a Moorish well, cut through the living rock to a great depth, the water of which is cold as ice and clear as crystal. The wells made by the Moors are always in repute, for it is well known what 5 pains they took to penetrate to the purest and sweetest springs and fountains. The one of which we now speak is famous throughout Granada, insomuch that water carriers, some bearing great water jars on their shoulders, others driving donkeys before them laden with earthen 10 vessels, are ascending and descending the steep, woody avenues of the Alhambra, from early dawn until a late hour of the night.

Among the water carriers who once resorted to this well, there was a sturdy, strong-backed, bandy-legged, 15 little fellow, named Pedro Gil, but called Peregi for shortness. Being a water carrier he was a Gallego, or native of Galicia, for in Spain the carriers of water and bearers of burdens are all sturdy little natives of Galicia.

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Peregil, the Gallego, had begun business with merely a great earthen jar which he carried upon his shoulder; by degrees he rose in the world, and was able to purchase an assistant of a correspondent class of animals, being a stout, shaggy-haired donkey. On each side of this, his 25 long-eared aid-de-camp, in a kind of pannier, were slung his water jars, covered with fig leaves to protect them from the sun. There was not a more industrious water carrier in all Granada, nor one more merry withal. The streets rang with his cheerful voice as he trudged after 30 his donkey, singing forth the usual summer note that resounds through the Spanish towns: "Who wants water