OF THE CLOUD ARTIST 77 



pulling out bulging elephants and rocs and 

 exaggerated humpy babies, and showing them 

 to us and turning them into something different. 

 My wife and I applaud him to the echo at such 

 times, and would surely write letters to him 

 thanking him for our entertainment, only we do 

 not know his address. On cirrus days he is 

 poetic, setting aloft filmy dreams in shell pink and 

 pale gold, whose shapes the more ambitious kinds 

 of birds have copied clumsily in their most deli- 

 cate feathers, whose tints the more fragile sorts 

 of flowers have tried to imitate in their petals. 

 Earth, by gazing continually upwards and by 

 striving her hardest to reproduce what she sees 

 there, has succeeded in acquiring the beauty which 

 we so much admire. The Alps, what are they 

 but the expression of her desire to possess 

 cumulus ? And of a hot morning at Naples you 

 may look over to Capri and see where she has 

 almost achieved one of those soft blue mysteries 

 which cost the Cloud Artist hardly a thought. 

 And with what landscape can Earth rival his least- 

 considered sunset display of purple plain and rosy 

 hill and lake of molten gold ? 



I say nothing against the beauty of Earth. On 

 the contrary, 1 spend a great deal of time here 

 and elsewhere in extolling it. But I think that, 

 being creatures of Earth, we push our admiration 



