gold, every ripple and wave into unsullied, shadowless crimson, and
purple, and scarlet, and colors for which there are no words in language,
and no ideas in the mind--things which can only be conceived while they
are visible; the intense hollow blue of the upper sky melting through it
all, showing here deep and pure, and lightness; there, modulated by the
filmy, formless body of the transparent vapor, till it is lost
imperceptibly in its crimson and gold."

It is in some cases indeed "not color but conflagration," and though the
tints are richer and more varied toward morning and at sunset, the
glorious kaleidoscope goes on all day long. Yet "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.
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 answer, 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. 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." [5]

Nor does the beauty end with the day. "It is nothing to sleep under the
canopy of heaven, where we have the globe of the earth for our place of