I have gazed on thee at thy rise and fall,
And bow'd my head beneath thy mid-day beams,
When my eye dared not meet thee. I have watch'd
For thee, and after thee, and pray'd to thee,
And sacrificed to thee, and read, and fear'd thee,
And ask'd of thee, and thou hast answer'd--but
Only to thus much. While I speak, he sinks--
Is gone--and leaves his beauty, not his knowledge,
To the delighted west, which revels in
Its hues of dying glory. Yet what is
Death, so it be but glorious? 'T is a sunset;
And mortals may be happy to resemble
The gods but in decay."

Thus the Chaldean priest, to the brightness of the setting sun.
Hear now the Greek girl, Myrrha, of his rising.

"The day at last has broken. What a night
Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven!
Though varied with a transitory storm,
More beautiful in that variety:[7]
How hideous upon earth! where peace, and hope,
And love, and revel, in an hour were trampled
By human passions to a human chaos,
Not yet resolved to separate elements:--
'T is warring still! And can the sun so rise,
So bright, so rolling back the clouds into
_Vapors more lovely than the unclouded sky_,
With golden pinnacles, and snowy mountains,
And billows purpler than the ocean's, making
In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth,
So like,--we almost deem it permanent;
So fleeting,--we can scarcely call it aught
Beyond a vision, 't is so transiently
Scatter'd along the eternal vault: and yet
It dwells upon the soul, and soothes the soul,
And blends itself into the soul, until
Sunrise and sunset form the haunted epoch
Of sorrow and of love."

How often _now_--young maids of London,--do you make _sunrise_ the
'haunted epoch' of either?

Thus much, then, of the skies that used to be, and clouds "more
lovely than the unclouded sky," and of the temper of their
observers. I pass to the account of clouds that _are_, and--I say
it with sorrow--of the _dis_temper of _their_ observers.

But the general division which I have instituted between
bad-weather and fair-weather clouds must be more carefully carried
out in the sub-species, before we can reason of it farther: and
before we begin talk either of the sub-genera and sub-species, or
super-genera and super-species of cloud, perhaps we had better
define what _every_ cloud is, and m