The Daily State Register

THE SUNBEAM.

The greatest of physical paradoxes is the sunbeam. It is the most potent and versatile force we have, and yet it behaves itself like the gentlest and most accommodating. Nothing can fall more softly or more silently upon the earth than the rays of our great luminary-not even the feathery flakes of snow, which thread their way through the atmosphere as if they were too filmy to yield to the demands of gravity, like grosser things. The most delicate slip of gold-leaf, exposed as a target to the sun's shafts, is not stirred to the extent of a hair, though an infant's faintest breath would set it into tremulous motion. The tenderest of organs-the apple of the eye-though pierced and buffeted each day by thousands of sunbeams, suffers no pain during the process, but rejoices in their sweetness, and blesses the useful light. Yet a few of those rays, insinuating themselves into a mass of iron, like the great Ohio river bridge, will compel the close-knit particles to separate, and will move the whole enormous fabric with as much ease as a giant would stir a straw. The play of those beams upon our sheets of water lifts up layer after layer into the atmosphere, and hoists whole rivers from their beds, only to drop them again in showers upon the plains. Let but the air drink in a little more sunshine at one place than another, and out of it springs the tempest or the hurricane, which desolates a whole region in its lunatic wrath. The marvel is that a power which is capable of assuming such a diversity of forms, and producing such stupendous results, should come to us in so gentle, so peaceful, and so unpretentious a guise.