84 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



plodding labours of men of science. Some day, I 

 trust, some painstaking scribe will complete a noble 

 volume of testimony to the prophetic insight of the 

 true poets, and award them their meed of praise as the 

 world's greatest discoverers, men who without one iota 

 of scientific training, without reasoning or scientific 

 deductions, have leapt at conclusions profoundly 

 accurate, and stated them in melodious verse that 

 has become enshrined in the nation's most precious 

 literary treasures. 



The painter, again, finds in the clouds at once his 

 greatest inspiration and his despair. The unspeakable 

 beauties of the heavenly embroideries in their form 

 fires his imagination and energizes his pencil; but 

 how can he ever hope to fix their shapes upon canvas 

 when they are never for a moment the same, and each 

 succession of outlines is lovelier than the last ! Let 

 it be set down to the credit of the dauntless human 

 mind that it perseveres in the face of so great dis- 

 couragement, for no sooner has he fixed upon his 

 canvas what his artistic eye has told him is an almost 

 perfect series of lovely forms than another appears 

 and clamours to be limned ; and he feels that, do 

 what he will, he can never be sure that he has fixed 

 the best. But if this is so with regard to the shape 

 of the clouds, what about their colour ? Nothing 

 surely can bear more eloquent tribute to the patience, 

 the skill, the genius of the painter than the way in 

 which he has wrestled with the utterly impossible 

 task of portraying with man-made media the unre- 

 producible glories of the heavenly panorama. Change 

 of form in clouds are rapid, yet so gently do they 

 occur that we can hardly, even while watching them 



