the returning day. More and more faint, the pageant fades below
towards the white haze of the horizon, where, in sharpest contrast,
leaps and welters against it the black jagged sea; and richer and
richer it glows upwards, till it cuts the azure overhead: until,
only too soon--


'The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out,
At one stride comes the dark,'


to be succeeded, after the long balmy night, by a sunrise which
repeats the colours of the sunset, but this time gaudy, dazzling,
triumphant, as befits the season of faith and hope. Such imagery,
it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence.
It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent
pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and
the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, and the bridal
joys and widowed tears of Eos, re-invents itself in the human mind,
as soon as it asserts its power--it may be, its sacred right--to
translate nature into the language of the feelings.

And, meanwhile, may we not ask--have we not a right--founded on that
common sense of the heart which often is the deepest reason--to ask,
If we, gross and purblind mortals, can perceive and sympathise with
so much beauty in the universe, then how much must not He perceive,
with how much must not He sympathise, for whose pleasure all things
are, and were created? Who that believes (and rightly) the sense of
beauty to be among the noblest faculties of man, will deny that
faculty to God, who conceived man and all besides?