love the clouds, and did I teach myself or did John Ruskin teach me? 
No matter. I think it was born with me, like loving my mother, or 
being hungry for sight and hearing of the sea. But anyway I love the 
clouds and to-day they would make a dullard love them. They are so 
high, gauzy, tenuous. Those high cirrus clouds nobody ever painted so 
well as Turner, because nobody ever saw them so well. Seeing comes 
before painting. There is a chronology in production. These clouds 
this day are diaphanous, remote, leisurely, out a-strolling like myself. 
I wonder if they have a farm they are walking to? No one need giggle 
SHADOWS 
as if | were not walking to my farm. Because | am sitting around 
and reading Keats and watching clouds and herds of cattle and leaves 
is no sign | am not walking to my farm. To rest is to get ready for 
walking. This business is all of a piece. I am on my way to my farm. 
But where the clouds are going, with their slow step, I do not now say, 
not knowing, only they are taking their time. But nobody could paint 
them. Each one in all the fleecy multitudes has a new, fleeting loveli- 
ness. God loans them one divine form, and that only for a moment, 
and then changes it to another. How rich God is in patterns, which 
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