THE CLOUDS 



IN common with nearly all the aerial phenomena, 

 clouds are accepted by most of us as a picturesque 

 adjunct to our daily life without our giving even a 

 passing thought to their work or their influence upon 

 our existence. Their beautiful, ever-changing shapes, 

 their evanescence, and the part they play continually 

 in our determination of our duties or pleasures, make 

 a superficial impression upon us; but it is only here 

 and there among a select few that any determined 

 attempt is made to understand them. The poet and 

 the painter love them in esoteric fashion, the one 

 because they pre-eminently lend themselves to poetic 

 fancy in their mystery, their elusiveness, their celestial 

 home, and the glamour that always surround that 

 which we can see, whose effects we can feel, yet whose 

 forms we cannot determine by touch or any of the 

 strict laws of sense. The wayward genius of Shelley 

 has made, perhaps, the most complete picture that 

 words can produce of the clouds, and at the same 

 time the most scientifically accurate, which, strangely 

 enough, in the estimate of most people, is the principal 

 attribute of true poetry. The poetic imagination has 

 in numberless cases outstripped scientific research, and 

 laid down in splendid wealth of allegory and metaphor 

 laws which have afterwards been tabulated by the 



