CLOUDS. 313 



But Nature, that all hearts might be enamored of the 

 morn, has wreathed her temples with dappled crimson, and 

 animated her countenance with those milder glories that 

 so well become the fair daughter of the dawn and the 

 gentle mother of dews. In ancient fable, Aurora is a 

 beautiful nymph who blushes when she first enters into 

 the presence of Day, and the clouds are the fabric with 

 which she veils her features at his approach. But a 

 young person of sensibility needs no such allegory to in- 

 spire him with a sense of the incomparable beauty and 

 grandeur of the orient at break of day. It is associated 

 with some of the happiest moments of his life ; and the 

 exhilarated feelings with which we look upon the day- 

 spring in the east are probably one cause of the tonic and 

 healthful influence of early rising. 



The forms of clouds are not less beautiful or expressive 

 than their colors. While their outlines are sufficiently 

 definite for picturesque effects, they often assume a great 

 uniformity in their aggregations. The frostwork on our 

 window-panes on cold winter mornings exhibits no greater 

 variety of figures than that assumed by the clouds in 

 their distribution over the heavens. Beinnnin^ in the 

 form of vapor that rolls its fleecy masses slowly over the 

 plain, resembling at a distance sometimes a smooth sheet 

 of water, and at other times a drifted snow-bank, the 

 cloud divides itself as it ascends, into globular heaps that 

 reflect the sunlight from a thousand silvery domes. These, 

 after gradually dissolving, reappear in a host of finely 

 mottled images, resembling the scales of a fish, then 

 marshal themselves into undulating rows like the wavi 

 of the sea, and are lastly metamorphosed into a thin gauzy 

 fabric, like crumpled muslin, or in a long drapery of 

 hair-like fringe, overspreading the higher regions of the 

 atmosphere. 



These different forms of cloud are elevated according to 



14 



