The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is the
rising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of his
coming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through the
forest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comes
very gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually become
conscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowly
increases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten
minutes that fades into a light bluish tinge--the gold turns to silver.
After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is to
appear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; a
minute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizon
line. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites me
blind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One
realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on its
axis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day.
The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil"
to describe this moment?--"Day boils at last." Gilder, I think, speaks
of it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, I
watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. It
is the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning.
Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing the
heavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usually
enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest
veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down.
His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the
morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or
storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They
are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as
if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and
yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this
mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it
could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God
to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and
particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.