United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
From every part of the rooms they saw the grey storms gather on the sea-horizon, and put themselves in marching array; and soon the march became a sweep, and the great dome of the heavens was covered with the lurid clouds, between which and the vivid green earth below there seemed to come a purple atmosphere, making the very threatening beautiful; and by-and-by the house was wrapped in sheets of rain shutting out sky, and sea, and inland view; till, of a sudden, the storm was gone by, and the heavy rain-drops glistened in the sun as they hung on leaf and grass, and the "little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west," and there was a pleasant sound of running waters all abroad.
Such an instrument could be readily made to show the distance of the sea-horizon, which at once determines the height of the observer above the sea-level. For this purpose all that would be necessary would be a means of placing the eye at some definite distance from the small mirror, and a fine vertical scale on the mirror to show the exact depression of the sea-horizon.
All night she kept her motionless position, looking far out and away to the eastward, till the dark mass of Blue Bluffs should resolve itself into the azure mist of castellated height that by daylight ever loomed upon the sea-horizon. Hours of suspense and of silence. At length, hurriedly resounding hoofs, and St. George once more stood among them. "A revolt at Blue Bluffs," said he.
The average diameter of the pupil itself is one-fifth of an inch, or about seven times as great as the depression of the sea-horizon in the case supposed. It would require very close observation and a good eye to determine whether a horizontal line seen on either side of the head were on the level of the centres of the eye-pupils, or lower by about one-seventh of the breadth of either pupil.
The smooth flow of the little rolling shays just below had a soothing hypnotic erect. But it was the glorious polished blue of the sea-horizon that bounded all his thoughts. Even while Miss Airedale gazed archly up at him, and he was busy with cheerful conversation, he was conscious of that broad band of perfect colour, monotonous, comforting, thrilling.
Somewhat like Madeira, it has a longitudinal spine of mountains, generically called Las Canadas; but, whilst the volcanic ridge of the Isle of Wood runs in a latitudinal line, the Junonian Cordillera has a whorl, the ancient as well as the modern seat of eruption. Around the island appeared to be a rim, as if the sea-horizon formed a raised saucer a common optical delusion at these altitudes.
In "The Tempest" it is a solitary island, circled by the mysterious sea-horizon, over which what may come who can tell? a place where the magician may work his will, and have all nature at the beck of his superior knowledge. The only writer who would have had a chance of rivalling Shakspere in his own walk, if he had been born in the same period of English history, is Chaucer.
At any rate, as the length of Hydra then lay horizontally above the Ship, whose masts reached it, we may well believe that this part of the picture of the heavens showed a sea-horizon and a ship, the great sea serpent lying along the horizon.
Now, of course, when we look into a mirror whose surface is exactly vertical, the line of sight to the eye-pupils of our image in the mirror is exactly horizontal; whereas the line of sight from the eyes to the image of the sea-horizon is depressed exactly as much as the line from the eyes to the real sea-horizon.
At last she was able to take her eyes from the surf and gaze at the sea-horizon of deepest peacock-blue and piled with cloud-masses, at the curve of the beach south to the jagged point of rocks, and at the rugged blue mountains seen across soft low hills, landward, up Carmel Valley. "Might as well sit down an' take it easy," Billy indulged her.
Word Of The Day