
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), III Six books on Light and Shade
The two Poets of Croisic.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), III Six books on Light and Shade
“The sacred lamp of day
Now dipt in western clouds his parting ray.”
Canto II, line 27.
The Shipwreck (1762)
“But no clouds in a red sky promised daylight's return, nor in lessening shadows did a long twilight gleam with reflected sun. Black night that no ray can pierce comes ever denser from earth, veiling the heavens.”
Sed nec puniceo rediturum nubila caelo
promisere jubar, nec rarescentibus umbris
longa repercusso nituere crepuscula Phoebo:
densior a terris et nulli peruia flammae
subtexit nox atra polos.
Source: Thebaid, Book I, Line 342
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Perspective of clouds, p. 100
Address at Illinois College (1881)
Context: Character is the entity, the individuality of the person, shining from every window of the soul, either as a beam of purity, or as a clouded ray that betrays the impurity within. The contest between light and darkness, right and wrong, goes on; day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, our characters are being formed, and this is the all-important question which comes to us in accents ever growing fainter as we journey from the cradle to the grave, "Shall those characters be good or bad?"
“Over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded with the eternal stars.”
Drum-Taps. Bivouac on a Mountain-side
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)