Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
    Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
    Emits a brighter ray.

-Oliver Goldsmith,
The Captivity, An Oratorio, 1764





Pianissimo (Yosemite)

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

-Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn





Chasing Light (French Alps)

Swift rush the spectral vapours white
Past limestone scars with ragged pines,
Showing--then blotting from our sight!--
Halt--through the cloud-drift something shines!

-Matthew Arnold,
Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse, 1824





Revelation (King's Canyon)

The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness.

-John Muir





Radiance (Sierra)

The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures,
the clouds above constantly dissolving into new
formations - each gift of nature possessing its own
radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony.

-Ruth Bernhard





Rays of Life (North Cascades)

Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet
Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set,
A light to lighten as from living eyes
The cold unlit close lids of one that lies
Dead, or a ray returned from death's far skies
To fire us living lest our lives forget.

-In the Bay, 1878





Splitting the Shroud (near Reno)

Sky -- what a scowl of cloud
    Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
    Splendid, a star!

-Robert Browning,
The Two Poets of Croisic, 1878





Discovery (French Alps)

Ev'n Light itself, which every thing displays,
Shone undiscover'd, till his brighter mind
Untwisted all the shining robe of day;
And, from the whitening undistinguish'd blaze,
Collecting every ray into his kind,

-James Thomson,
A Poem Sacred to the Memory
of Sir Isaac Newton
, 1727





Behind the Clouds (Baja)

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
The Rainy Day, 1841





Living Air (SF Bay)

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.--And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things

-William Wordsworth,
Lines Composed a Few Miles
above Tintern Abbey
, 1798





Living Fire (SF Bay)

Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet
Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set,
A light to lighten as from living eyes
The cold unlit close lids of one that lies
Dead, or a ray returned from death's far skies
To fire us living lest our lives forget.

-Algernon Charles Swinburne,
In the Bay, 1878





Passion Kindled (Utah)

    And beauty, all concentrating like rays
Into one focus, kindled from above;

-George Gordon, Lord Byron,
Don Juan: Canto the Second, 1819







more pictures of rays




images © 1998 by Randy Wang
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