Clouds.

In one of those remarkable books* for which we are indebted to the peculiar genius of Mr. Ruskin, there is an observation to the effect, that it is a strange thing how little people in general know about the sky. The author goes on to say, that every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great, ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and every thing well watered; and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. Instead of this, however, there is scarcely a moment when nature is not producing in this same sky scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory; and laying all these before men indiscriminately. And yet we will not attend to such phenomena; we rarely make them a subject of observation, hardly ever of thought. Who watches and records the forms and precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that occasionally gird the sun at noon? How few notice the dance of the dead clouds when they are left by the last rays of sunlight! And yet it is in clouds that the highest characters of the beautiful, and even of the sublime, are to be traced; for it is the clouds that give life and variety to the sky.

The sky itself, even when cloudless, is, beyond a doubt, one of the most striking objects in nature, and one the most fitted to excite the deepest emotions.

"The chasm of sky above my head

Is Heaven's profoundest azure:-an abyss

In which the everlasting stars abide,

And whose soft gloom, and boundless depth, might tempt

The curious eye to look for them by day."- Wordsworth's Excursion. But it is when this mighty chasm, the blue vault above us, is partly studded with clouds, that we can best appreciate its beauty; for these objects have a strange relation to the ether, and are yet quite independent of it. Belonging to our earth, they form a link connecting us with infinite space. They are poised between us and heaven, derived from the earth, but melting into the sky; and they abound in suggestive phenomena well worthy of attention.

To commence with a mechanical definition, we may describe clouds generally as visible vapour, suspended in the air at some distance above the earth. With the essentially shifting, formless, shadowy character of vapour, becoming visible or remaining invisible according to minute changes of temperature in different parts of the vast aërial ocean that floats above the earth, they combine distinct outlines, peculiar and striking colours, and other characteristics, which enable us to speak of them as

*Modern Painters, vol. i. part ii. sec. 3, chap. 1.