ENGLISH SKIES 95 



and stood, like the sea, &quot; immovably.&quot; Shelley s rainbow 

 &quot; stood &quot; ; and in an earlier poem it is written &quot; I do 

 set my bow in the cloud/ or &quot; and the bow shall be in 

 the cloud.&quot; The phrases suggest a sort of permanence. 

 In contrast it is strange to think that in a rainbow, how 

 ever still it abides, the whole form is made and remade 

 every particle of a second by a new refraction from a new 

 drop of water. It is built and scattered even more quickly 

 than Shelley s ghost-like Cloud. 



This broken shaft of a rainbow against the desert 

 island was the most constant but by no means the most 

 brilliant rainbow. When you looked down any north 

 easterly street in the town, you were almost startled to 

 see it crossed by a band of rainbow, as Fleet Street is 

 crossed by telegraph wires. The misty clouds dived 

 down the gullies in the hills and tossed their prismatic 

 arcs towards the town. The higher you mounted the hill 

 behind the town the wider and more glorious grew the 

 bow till it arched the valleys in a good half circle. As the 

 ship steamed north-east in a stiff wind and sunny air it 

 carried as booty from the island a dancing atom of the 

 rainbow in its company. It would need a long essay in 

 optics, I imagine, to explain why the spray-bow was 

 very blue and the cloud-bow quite without this colour ; 

 for rainbows differ more in their attributes than most 

 observers recognise. The forms of the colour-bands as 

 well as the colours themselves vary greatly. We have no 

 such permanent rainbows in England. Our skies, often 

 invisible for days, can never boast the southern blue. 

 Suns rise with a more fiery splendour over the Alps. 

 Yet, whatever we miss, we may claim to live under a 

 shifting canopy as diverse in colour as a Persian carpet 

 and a Proteus in form. The western sky becomes itself 

 as bright as a rainbow throughout tumultuous March, 



