C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Sky
The starry cope of heaven.
The silence that is in the starry sky.
Green calm below, blue quietness above.
The sky is full of tokens which speak to the intelligent.
This majestical roof, fretted with golden fire.
To understand that the sky is everywhere blue, we need not go round the world.
How bravely autumn paints upon the sky the gorgeous fame of summer which is fled!
The heavens are nobly eloquent of the Deity, and the most magnificent heralds of their Maker’s praise.
That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
And they were canopied by the blue sky, so cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful, that God alone was to be seen in heaven.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two minutes together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity.
When I look into the blue sky, it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries, and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awful loving-kindness.
The starry heaven, though it occurs very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to anything in the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur; for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our ideas of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion as makes it impossible, on ordinary occasions, to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.
Sky 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.