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Transitory, painted Phantoms of the Sky"
sky, with a force and intensity such as elsewhere you must seek in dreams. Black continents of monsters jawed with fire; lagoons of shining ether; a star, safe and silent, like a candle burning by a sleeping child; floating islands rimmed with silver; bergs of saffron fire drifting in the solar sea; gardens and golden gates and towers of snow; armies with drums of darkness and terrible spears; a dove all alone in heaven; bosoms filled with roses; cataracts of moonshine falling from cloud to cloud; peacocks made of stars; gonfalons of flaming dew; and battlements thronged with unearthly faces. . . .
There is, indeed, no such picture-book as this picture-book of the clouds; but it is not by such concrete shapes of fancy as these that the art of the sky seriously takes hold of us—these merely imitative, one might say punning, simulacra, accidental and unmeaning as faces seen in the fire; it is rather by pictorial moods of expressiveness too fluid to be called symbolic, great abstract schemes of modulated radiance, that, like some of the greatest pictures, mean nothing but—Eternity; Eternity—or some other words hardly less simply profound: in its power, in fact, of expressing the trancelike dreams of the spirit, moods of the imagination, and even states of the mind.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this art of the sky is its power over the soul. With all its pomp and magnificence of color, it is never sensual. Its glories and its revelries, though bright as a
