wn way, affecting the mass of the air with vital
agitation, and purging it from the impurity of all morbific
elements.

In the entire system of the Firmament, thus seen and understood,
there appeared to be, to all the thinkers of those ages, the
incontrovertible and unmistakable evidence of a Divine Power in
creation, which had fitted, as the air for human breath, so the
clouds for human sight and nourishment;--the Father who was in
heaven feeding day by day the souls of His children with marvels,
and satisfying them with bread, and so filling their hearts with
food and gladness.

Their _hearts_, you will observe, it is said, not merely their
bellies,--or indeed not at all, in this sense, their bellies--but
the heart itself, with its blood for this life, and its faith for
the next. The opposition between this idea and the notions of our
own time may be more accurately expressed by modification of the
Greek than of the English sentence. The old Greek is--

[Greek: empiplon trophes kai euphrosynes
tas kardias hemon.]

filling with meat, and cheerfulness, our hearts. The modern Greek
should be--

[Greek: empiplon anemou kai aphrosynes
tas gasteras hemon.]

filling with wind, and foolishness, our stomachs.

You will not think I waste your time in giving you two cardinal
examples of the sort of evidence which the higher forms of
literature furnish respecting the cloud-phenomena of former times.

When, in the close of my lecture on landscape last year at Oxford,
I spoke of stationary clouds as distinguished from passing ones,
some blockheads wrote to the papers to say that clouds never were
stationary. Those foolish letters were so far useful in causing a
friend to write me the pretty one I am about to read to you,
quoting a passage about clouds in Homer which I had myself never
noticed, though perhaps the most beautiful of its kind in the
Iliad. In the fifth book, after the truce is broken, and the
aggressor Trojans are rushing to the onset in a tumult of clamor
and charge, Homer says that the Greeks, abiding them "stood like
clouds." My correspondent, giving the passage, writes as follows:--

"SIR,--Last winter when I was at Ajaccio, I was one day reading
Homer by the open window, and came upon the lines--

[Greek: All' emenon, nephelesin eoikotes has te Kronion
Nenemies estesen ep' akropoloisin oressin,
Atremas, ophr' heudesi menos Boreao