Odes to every zephyr;
Ne'er an ode to thee.
. . .
Come as came our fathers,
Heralded by thee,
Conquering from the eastward,
Lords by land and sea.

Come, and strong within us
Stir the Viking's blood,
Bracing brain and sinew;
Blow, thou wind of God!"

No, the power of vision is not dim, on man's part; nor, on the
part of the winds of heaven, is abated their natural power to rule
men's moods as they rule the responsive ocean. Those whose
mystic insight is undulled by the materialistic tendencies of the
age can still have glimpses of

"heaven's cherubim, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air."

The untutored mind of the Indian, says Pope, sees God not only
in winds, but in clouds. Clouds are, so to speak, the creations of
the air, and share its mystic fortunes. Even Keble could respond
to their suggestion of life, and asks:

"The clouds that wrap the setting sun,
Why, as we watch their floating wreath,
Seem they the breath of life to breathe?"

Wordsworth could not fail to have this experience:

"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills."

These are genuine echoes of primitive feeling. Needless to
elaborate the evidence of the ancient myths or of the beliefs of
primitive peoples. Not that the evidence will not amply repay
study, but that for the purpose of grasping general principles,
that just adduced in the case of the winds has sufficiently served
our turn. The following old Finnish prayer, however, is so
fraught with significance that it would be unpardonable to pass
it by. It is addressed to Ukko, the Heaven-god:

"Ukko, thou, O God above us,
Thou, O Father in the heavens,
Thou who rulest in the cloud-land,
And the little cloud-lambs leadest,
Send us down the rain from heaven,
Make the drops to drop with honey,
Let the drooping corn look upward,
Let the grain with plenty rustle."

This beautiful little poem-prayer places us about midway in the
development of the conscious expression of the mystic
influences exercised by cloud-land. We see how, as with the
winds, the clouds have played a severely practical role among
the conditions which have rendered human life possible upon
the globe. The original animistic conception of the clouds as
themselves personal agents has yielded to that of a god who
rules the clouds, though the animistic t