This phenomenon appeared off the northern coast of Block Island about 1720, and reappeared at irregular intervals down to the year 1832, since which it has not been seen. A common impression of those seeing it for the first time was that it was a light on board of some ship, or a ship on fire when very bright. Arnold, in his History of Rhode Island, gives an account of it, and also of the tradition which assigned to it a strange origin. "This light," he remarks, "has been the theme of much learned discussion within the present century, and, while the superstition connected with it is of course rejected, science has failed thus far in giving it a satisfactory explanation." Dr. Aaron C. Willey, a resident physician of Block Island, wrote a careful account of the phenomenon in 1811, which was published at the time in the Parthenon, whatever that may have been. He says: "Its appellation originated from that of a ship called the Palatine, which was designedly cast away at this place in the beginning of the last century, in order to conceal, as tradition reports, the inhuman treatment and murder of some of its unfortunate passengers." This was an emigrant ship bound from Holland to Pennsylvania. Some seventeen of the survivors were landed on the island, but they all died except three. One lady, it was said, having "much gold and silver plate on board," refused to land. The ship floated off the rocks, and soon after disappeared for ever. Dr, Willey says he saw this light in February, 1810. "It was twilight, and the light was then large and greatly lambent, very bright, broad at the bottom and terminating acutely upward. From each side seemed to issue rays of faint light similar to those perceptible in any blaze placed in the open air at night. It continued about fifteen minutes from the time I first observed it, then gradually became smaller and more dim until it was entirely extinguished." The same gentleman saw it again in the following December, when he thought it was a light on board of some vessel until undeceived. It moved along apparently parallel to the shore on this occasion, after a time falling behind the doctor, who was riding along the coast. Finally, it stopped, then moved off some rods and stopped again. The same authority declares that he had been told by a gentleman living near the sea that it had often been so bright as to "illuminate considerably the walls of his room through the windows." This happened only when the light was within half a mile from the shore, for it was "often seen blazing at six or seven miles' distance, and strangers supposed it to be a vessel on fire."
M.H.
NOTES.
It is not very extraordinary that printers' ink is a poor pigment for painting sunsets or sunrises. The strange thing is that travelers and sentimentalizers obstinately ignore the fact, and hang their paper walls with more scenery of that description than any other. What a gallery of alpine, arctic and marine sunsets we have, and how blank an impression do they all produce! From any of them, done with a clever pen by one who undertakes to describe what he has freshly seen, we gather that the spectacle must have been very fine, and must have deeply delighted the spectator. We can even catch some tints here and there, but they are fugitive, and each escapes the eye before it grasps the next one. If we shut our eyes on Tennyson's page we may realize a glimpse of Mont Blanc blushing through "a thousand shadowy penciled valleys," and have a momentary pleasure; but the poet's picture does not abide with us. Some one devotes a couple of pages to mapping out the infinitude of half-tints that composed a summer's evening view looking seaward from the North Cape—a good subject faithfully gone into, but still not a satisfactory sketch even of the reality. The pen and type will outline and shade, but cannot color. They give us some fair landscapes made up of form and effect; they can compass a cavernous bit of Rembrandt, a curtain of fog or shower, or a staircase of wood and rock climbing into the distance, just as they can sometimes faintly depict the infinite chiaroscuro of the Miserere in St. Peter's; but the monochrome, in music as in painting, is their limit.
Has photography dealt hardly with portrait-painting as a branch of art, or has it benefited it by weeding out the feeble? The Memorial Exhibition will assist in determining. It will, we hope, allow the best living painters in this department to be fully represented by the side of their predecessors. We shall then see if the Inmans, Neagles, and Sullys are an extinct species, and if the ranks of their pupils have melted away before the cannon-like camera. We cannot believe that the sun, always exaggerating perspective except when rectified by the stereoscope, and more or less falsifying light and shade by the chemical effect of different rays, is to be the only limner of faces. Thus imperfect even in mechanical execution, it seems impossible that he should supersede future Vandycks. As Webster used to say to young lawyers, there is plenty of room up stairs. Painters may fearlessly aim to get above the sun. Take one of Sully's women and compare it with the smoothest print softened into inanity by the dots of the retoucher of negatives—the representative of the element of art in the process. A difference exists equivalent to that between brain and no brain. No woman, "primp" herself for the sitting as she may, can present her soul to the dapper gentleman under the canopy of black velvet as Sully saw it. She does not know herself, as reflected in her lineaments, as he did; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the knight of the tripod does not know her at all.
The same is true of John Neagle as a perpetuator of character with the pencil. Men were his best subjects. In individualizing them he has had no superior, if an equal, among American artists. His finish was not always good, and his coloring for that reason occasionally crude. In female heads he was less happy: character-painters generally are. Stuart's women are equally defective, but in a rather different way, being hard and angular in drawing.
England is determined not to shrink from the solution of the time-honored problem of the result of the meeting between an irresistible force and an impregnable target. Her iron-clads have piled pellicle on pellicle of iron till two feet thick has become their normal shell. Everything thinner has been punctured, and now an eighty-ton gun, to cost sixty thousand pounds, is getting ready to perforate that. There must be a stopping-point for all this somewhere. Perhaps the fate of armor afloat may soon be settled finally by the torpedo, as its efficiency on land was disposed of by the bullet, and the men-at-arms of the sea no longer lord it over hosts of wooden yeomanry. Happy the nation that can look on with its hands firmly in its pockets while others lavish their treasure in seeking the new philosopher's stone!