Robert Michael Ballantyne

Up in the Clouds Robert Michael Ballantyne

It is man's nature to soar intellectually, and it seems to have been his ambition from earliest ages to soar physically. Every one in health knows, or at some period of life must have known, that upward bounding of the spirit which induces a longing for the possession of wings, that the material body might be wafted upwards into those blue realms of light, which are so attractive to the eye and imagination of poor creeping man that he has appropriately styled them the heavens. Man has envied the birds since the world began. Who has not watched, with something more than admiration, the easy gyrations of the sea-mew, and listened, with something more than delight, to the song of the soaring lark? To fly with the body as well as with the mind, is a wish so universal that the benignant Creator Himself seems to recognise it in that most attractive passage in Holy Writ, wherein it is said that believers shall "mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." Of course man has not reached the middle of the nineteenth century without making numerous attempts to fly bodily up to the skies. Fortunately, however, such ambitious efforts have seldom been made except by the intellectually enthusiastic. Prosaic man, except in the case of the Tower of Babel, has remained content to gaze upwards with longing desire, and only a few of our species in the course of centuries have possessed temerity enough to make the deliberate effort to ride upon the wings of the wind.