HUGH MILLER 133 



light," and straightway a grey diffused light springs up in 

 the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited 

 expanse of steaming, vaporous sea, journeys through the 

 heavens towards the west. One heavy sunless day is made 

 the representative of myriads ; the faint light waxes fainter 

 it sinks beneath the dim undefined horizon ; the first 

 scene of the drama closes upon the seer ; and he sits a while 

 on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what 

 seems to be a calm and starless night. 



* The light again brightens it is day ; and over an ex- 

 panse of ocean, without visible bound, the horizon has be- 

 come wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life 

 in that great sea invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life ; 

 but, from the comparative distance of the point of view 

 occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can 

 be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations 

 before a gentle gale ; and what most strongly impresses 

 the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmo- 

 spheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occu- 

 pied in the previous vision by seething steam, or grey, 

 smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent ; and only in an 

 upper region, where the previously invisible vapour of the 

 tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. 

 But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere they lie, 

 thick and manifold an upper sea of great waves, separated 

 from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like 

 them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A 

 mighty advance has taken place in creation ; but its most 

 conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent 

 atmosphere of a firmament stretched out over the earth, 

 that separates the water above from the waters below. 

 But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for 



OF 



