A Rhapsody of Clouds

“ O ETHER divine ! ” cried Prometheus ; but he was chained supine on the rock, and forced to see the sky. We who walk erect at will are apt to confine our attention to the things of earth. There are two landscapes, two firmaments, always visible to us ; but it is as if, by some secret compact, the upper and finer one were reserved apart for birds and poets, or for the forlorn face that here and there turns upward in search of some better justice or fairer hope than has been found on earth. Now and then we find a person who has the habit of looking at the night skies, and mayhap knows the constellations, so that the stars are not accidental sparks to him any longer, but old friends, any one of whose faces would be missed if it were withdrawn. But who looks upward by day and sees the clouds ?

There are ways of enticing people, or reminding ourselves, to appreciate this neglected side (the upper side) of landscape. It is no sin to improve upon Nature, or at least upon our physical endowments for apprehending her beauty. The camera obscura is one such contrivance. Fix a suitable lens in the front of any old box, with a dark curtain under which to thrust the head, and the “ divine ether,” with its cloudcuckoo-town of shifting scenery, will stoop to our infirmity, and mimic itself in little — but with all its glorious light and color — below our face. The Claude Lorraine glass is another simple instrument of magical effect. The great landscape that seemed too vast to look at, in its sweep of valley and woods and hills and sky, comes into the compass of the hand, with the lights and shades and hues all there, but mellowed and softened ; it is beautiful as ever, but it all floats on the facet of a crystal; the big giant has eaten of Alice’s cake in Wonderland, and becomes a heavenly child ; the finite eye has captured the infinite distance by a pretty trick. The poet Gray, it is said, used always to carry a common lens in his pocket when he “ walked abroad,” in whose surface to see the landscape imaged ; thus, we may suppose, to bring it nearer the compass of an elegy or an ode.

But this present screed was entered upon in order to recommend to all readers of The Atlantic and lovers of nature the use of still another bit of artifice for aiding the natural eye to see the supernatural beauties and wonders of sky-and-cloud scenery. I mean the ordinary smoked glasses of the optician’s shop. They should not be colored glasses at all, but just sufficiently clouded with a colorless smoke-tint to tone down the intensity of the brightest, light. The test should be that one can gaze fixedly at a bright, sunlit white cloud floating in noonday blue, without trying the eye. I do not believe (though I am no optician) that the ordinary habitual use of such glasses is to be recommended, except where the eye imperatively demands protection. They are rather for special emergencies, such as a dusty wind-storm in the city, to keep the awning-posts and paving-blocks out of one’s eyes ; or on the snow slopes of a mountain, to blunt the intolerable glare ; or in a railroad car, to fend off cinders blundering in through an open window ; and especially for this æsthetical use of which I speak. One feels, on using them for the first time, that he never before has properly seen a cloud ; for the reason that never before has he been able to look steadily right into the face and eyes of a brilliant noonday sky.

In this way, with the shield of the soft-toned glasses before the eyes, one no longer gives a general look at the heavens now and then, with a hasty glance, as to know whether it is necessary to take an umbrella ; but he seats himself before it, as before the surf, or before a play at the theatre, to watch deliberately what goes on. Nor does he any longer look at an individual cloud that is pointed out for some grotesque shape, or some remarkable color ; but he sees the whole field, the complex groupings of forms and tints, the marchings and counter-marchings of the sky battalions. One might as well suppose he knew the wonders of forest scenery when he had only looked at single trees, as to imagine he had seen the clouds when he had only glanced hastily at an occasional cloud. There are wonderful mountains among them, with sheer precipices, and shadowy caves, and Alpine crags ; dark towers, such as Childe Roland blew his blast before ; minarets and domes, with mysterious arabesque of Oriental tracery; serene ocean shores, where the gray sand glimmers through shoaling blue, and the round-breasted galleons sail smoothly over.

It is great to sit in a lawn-chair, of a summer Sunday afternoon, and gaze undazzled into the upper sky. A light breeze taps the pear-tree leaves softly, as a mother might pat together the palms of her child. The organ snores sleepily in the distant church ; even the choir sounds musical, heard faintly and occasionally, as if it were a far-off memory of better music. The blue of the zenith is intense with light that would be unbearable to the unshielded eye, and as the Cleopatra’s barges of slow clouds sail softly across, with their round, bellying sails of snow and pearl, it only makes the azure more “ deeply and darkly ” blue. By and by the color, or the very depth and boundlessness of it, seems to inundate one’s brain, as the blue, deep sea-tide lifts through a coral reef, and all the little ocean-creatures stretch out their delicate hands and feed confidingly in the lucid clearness. So do delicate brain-fancies float and feed tranquilly in this inflooding tide of the blue heavens.

Nor is all this without its possibility of solid scientific usefulness, O dear specialist, that inclinest to flout such skyey contemplations ! Why do those clouds float there so buoyantly; and what makes the cirrus take on those feathery forms ? Do not tell me it is the wind, unless I am to believe there be winds celestial, very different from winds terrestrial. Those filmy tufts, those lightest dabs, drawn out in wavy brush-lines, as if with a pencil dipped in sublimated wool, or in the quintessence of dissolved cobweb, — is it by electricity, or magnetism ? Or have some of those puffy-cheeked cherubs, seen so commonly tilting about the mediæval skies by the old masters, but not any more seen with the naked eye,— have some of these bodiless baby-heads blown them at one another, for a game?

Even thou, O dear Gradgrindling, canst find thine account in this sky-gazing! It is even of “ use,” “ practically.” For there is no better barometer, or prophet of the weather, than such a film of cloud as one sees yonder. If it grows and grows, as we watch it (not that we can see it grow, — cloud prophets are too subtle for that; but if we see from moment to moment that it has grown), then we may know it will pretty surely rain. While if it fade and fade, and suddenly we find ourselves only remembering what was, — for it is not any more, — then we may pretty safely leave the umbrella at home.

Some days the outlines of the clouds are all making faces at each other: merry faces, if one feels in that mood, and therefore unconsciously compels the eye to that selection of forms ; solemn faces, if that be the masterful feeling. Why should the profiles generally be looking from right to left? Or is that only an idiosyncrasy of my own ? With me, it is so on wall-paper, it is so in the cloud-tapestry of the sky ; my mind, if for the moment idle, perpetually sees faces, nearly always profiles, and nearly always looking to the left. Is it because one sketches a profile on paper with the right hand, and so with the projecting points toward the left, away from the hand, which otherwise would hide them ? Some poet may say, if he chooses to, that it is with all the faces and aspects of this universe as with those of the clouds, — that all look smiling and benevolent to us, or grim and forbidding, according to our own voluntary state of heart; but I will not say it, for I am not perfectly sure it is true. The poet will probably say it if he only hopes it is true.

When presently we are able to sail the air in the coming balloon, it will be pleasant to make afternoon excursions among the summer clouds. We shall rendezvous here and there in their recesses. " Come ! ” one will say to his friend; “ let us talk it over on the rosy southwest corner of that mother-of-pearl mountain in the sky.” Or we shall bid John unpack the luncheon basket in the shade of yonder floating shelf of foamy ivory; or we shall agree to meet, at half past two, just under the billowy chin of what seems an aerial Martha Washington.

How can so soft and fluffy a texture, an airy pile of birds’ breasts and gossamer, hold so firm an outline against the blue, and catch such a splendor of intense light ? As it comes floating and toppling across the sky, one would like to shoot a feather bed up through it, and let the azure through the soft hole. Or one would like to see an angel out of Paradise Lost, or, better, out of Dante’s Paradiso, push the yielding curtains of it aside, and for an awed and heartbeating moment look earnestly, half smiling, down upon the earth.

It is a dead enough world, if people merely glance at it with the rambling, unsteady eye of a preoccupied mind. Water, for example, — what is it but drinkable fluid, or oxygen and hydrogen, to the average mortal ? The “ primrose by the river’s brim ” and the river by its own brim are equally stale, flat, and unprofitable. But let a man look close,— say, at the tense muscle of the running stream, or the bubble-shadows on the sands in the eddy, each with a yellow star in its centre : then the water is a living wonder. And these clouds — an every-day affair, no doubt, a “ useful trouble,” to most apprehensions ; but if we look close we cannot but take in the unimagined beauty of them. Changeful as the sea, over which they have sailed so many leagues that they have taken on a certain mimicry of the intricate forms of ocean-waves, they are without the quick, criss-cross fret and restlessness of the sea ; for the clouds are nearly always calm: over its “ restlessness,” their “ rest.” Yet they are never still ; the gossamer tracery, if you watch it, is all alive, as if the films and veins of agate should come to life, and begin to weave and unweave their interchanging fibres.

There is another odd and interesting effect of the dark glasses. When one takes them off, after a prolonged gaze through them, the whole world gains suddenly a new splendor. It is like a sforzando chord in a symphony of Rubinstein’s. Or it is like a sudden bracing up of the spirit when one concludes to fling off a dusky mood, and enters the sunshine of some hearty action.

It is not often that we can watch, near by, the rapid formation of cloud; but it once happened to me, in climbing among the “ American Alps,” — the Sierra Nevada, — to find myself on a crag precisely underneath the line of low cloud formation. Leaning back to rest against the rock, and looking upward, I saw the mountain drapery weaving itself — out of nothing, as it appeared : blue air on one side of the line ; dark slaty films (nearest it), then shreds, then masses of flying cloud, on the other. Clear across the sky extended the distinct edge of this swift and incessant weaving. It was like nothing but a great shadowy banner streaming out in the gale from an invisible cord strained tight across the sky. It was the work of the Earth Spirit in Faust: —

Sometimes, with the eyes shielded by their smoke-tint armor against the blinding splendor of the summer blue contrasting with its dark cloud scenery, we may attend a thunder-storm symphony in the air. Solemnly the curtain begins to rise ; the wind carries it, for there is a wild wind far up in the heavens, though as yet all is still below. There is a deep hush upon us all, — the trees, and birds, and the rest of us in the audience ; for we are full of expectancy. It grows insensibly darker and darker in “ the hall of the firmament.” There are rolls of distant thunder, — it is the orchestra, and the instruments are being tuned; you hear the contra-basses trying a chromatic passage in hesitating touches. There is some trilogy of Wagner’s toward; for the stage is preparing, and the scenes are slowly shifting, — lofty walls of cloud that move silently to one side and the other ; but no celestial actors emerge, and the azure floor remains empty. Or possibly they are there, but invisible; as most of the orchestral harmonies are still inaudible,

all but those louder and bolder doublebasses, and the rolling and rattling crescendo of the drums. By and by a flash of keen lightning blazes out, like the crash of brazen cymbals threaded with the shrilling piccolo.

At such times you may occasionally catch a strange effect. You are looking through a deep cleft in the black clouds, cut down across the sky, at the brilliant blue between. Suddenly a lightning flash completely reverses, for just an instant, the light and shade ; the gloomy cloud-walls gleam out intensely luminous, while the towering shaft of intervening sky is dark by contrast, and so starts forward tangibly from the distance, like a momentary incarnation of some black genie of the Arabian Nights.

On some more tranquil August afternoon, when the sky-dome is lifted to its serenest height, and only pearly cirrus, so far up as almost to be motionless, bars it from being infinite, we may recline in our couch chair and gaze upward so long and steadily that we drowse a little. Or, if still awake, we seem to lose ourselves in space. It is as if there were a second sort of sleep possible to us; not the withdrawal of the consciousness back into the inner brain, as in night slumber, but the expansion or floating out of the consciousness into the deeps of outer existence. Is it any wonder if sometimes, then, the methodical reason gives way to fitting fancies, and, while the clouds flow slowly and smoothly across the upper world, our reveries run into rhythm, and such things get themselves written as this with which we close?

CLOUD TRACERY.