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Newton compared the tints obtained in this way with the tints of his soap-bubble, and he calculated the corresponding thickness. How he did this may be thus made plain to you: Suppose the water of the ocean to be absolutely smooth; it would then accurately represent the earth's curved surface. Let a perfectly horizontal plane touch the surface at any point.
Therewith he laid his hand upon a small wheel, and gave it two or three turns, thus partially opening the main air-valve and admitting a thin stream of air into the vacuum chambers of the Flying Fish, with the result that the huge craft at once began to settle down toward the surface of the sea, upon which, a few minutes later, she floated buoyantly as a soap-bubble.
Musical people suffer more from such interruptions than persons whose ears are not similarly refined can imagine; for the tone colors of a Wagnerian score are as exquisitely delicate and refined as the evanescent films and colors of a soap-bubble, so that the mere rustling of a fan or a programme mars them.
Upon the table stood a Venetian glass with a narrow neck and a bulb clear and thin as a soap-bubble, containing vines and blossoms of the passion-flower, which he had evidently been using as models in his work. The page he was illuminating was the prophetic Psalm which describes the ignominy and sufferings of the Redeemer.
In the north we have the bits of fine white foam which we characteristically call frog-spittle, but these tropic relatives have bigger bellows and their covering is like the interfering mass of films which emerges from the soap-bubble bowl when a pipe is thrust beneath the surface and that delicious gurgling sound produced.
We ask, for instance, for money; and we expect an answer of happiness. But we do not get happiness, we only get money, which is a wholly different thing. We ask for popularity and reputation, and we expect these gifts, when received, to last; but we have asked for something whose very nature is that it does not last. It is like asking for a soap-bubble and expecting to get a billiard-ball.
Suddenly I became conscious of a faint luminousness somewhere in the atmosphere, and looking about me to discover the cause, I observed what looked like a ball of lambent, greenish flame clinging to the foremast-head, where it swayed about, elongating and contracting with the roll of the ship, exactly as a gigantic soap-bubble might have done.
Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along the vista of his past years, and his thought was akin to Heine's: Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes I see the motley mocking fool's-cap rise!
Like each of his previous schemes for quickly becoming rich, this invention turned out to be a soap-bubble, bursting as soon as trial was made of it. What was left intact, however, was his determination to go to the banks of the Neva; and, throughout the spring, successive letters announced preparations for departure.
Suddenly we were "clothed upon" with a house which, though it came indeed from the earth, might well have come direct from heaven: a great uprush of water spread above us a tent-like dome, through which the sun came with a cool, broken, almost frosty glitter. We seemed in the heart of a huge soap-bubble. I exclaimed with delight. "I thought you would enjoy my sun-shade!" said Mr. Skymer.
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