A SPRING HERESY 89 



shot up through the fog-sea to pay directer homage 

 to the first spring dawn. 



As it was, I had in mind many such dawns witnessed 

 from mountain heights where it was my fortune and 

 delight for a time to live thousands of feet above the 

 clouds. Well I knew the scene then being enacted 

 above me, this upper, became a nether sea of cloud, 

 like primal chaos without form and void "thohoo 

 wa vohoo," as the old Hebrew has it, in words whose 

 hollow vowels have in them something of the 

 actual void our own serve but to suggest by a 

 negative idea. There is no scene on earth so 

 absolute in detachment an aboriginal solitude, 

 as it seems, wherein is no detail to suggest 

 agency, individualized being, time or place. Looking 

 down upon it, one could imagine that this visible 

 nothingness had always been, would never cease to 

 be. But slowly the east flushes a dull purple a 

 thing so different, so far off across that vast grey 

 floor of cloud, as to seem an effluence from some 

 brighter world. Left and right it creeps, a tide that 

 at first combs lazily some distant strand with waves 

 that glow through richening purples into carmine, 

 then ripples farther aside and begins to flow forward, 

 a broadening sea of orange and gold, washing each 

 swelling cloudbank, burnishing each vapoury hum- 

 mock with ever rarer hues, so that florist and 

 lapidary themselves must despair of finding fit name 

 or symbol for them. At last the central sun himself 

 comes up. The colours of all things living are his 

 ministers ; they are formed and transformed endlessly 

 before him as with haste to do him service. The 

 very air is tense with light. He who has looked down 



