endency still remains in
the expression, "the little cloud-lambs." Now we have passed to
the stage of modern animism which regards the clouds as a part
of a vast system, the essential being of which must be described
as consciousness.

The chief of the ideas immanent in cloud scenery would seem to
be the vagueness and unsubstantiality of its ever-changing
pageantry, prompting dreams of glorious possibilities which our
earthly environment is yet too gross to realise. At any rate, it is
safe to assert that this constituted its main charm for the
passionately visionary soul of Shelley. Study this description of
a cloud-scape--one among a host which could be gathered from
his poems:

"The charm in which the sun has sunk, is shut
By darkest barriers of enormous cloud,
Like mountain over mountain huddled--but
Growing and moving upwards in a crowd,
And over it a space of watery blue,
Which the keen evening star is shining through."

Or study that poem, unsurpassable of its kind, devoted wholly
to this theme--especially the stanza which closes it:

"I am the daughter of earth and water,
And the nursling of the sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain, when with never a stain
The pavilion of heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb
I arise and unbuild it again."

How crammed are these lines with the purest Nature Mysticism
as moderns understand it! The sense of living process reigns
supreme. They are the offspring, not of fancy, nor even of
imagination as ordinarily conceived--but of insight, of vision, of
living communion with a living world.

It is tempting, while dealing with the airy realms of cloud-land,
to dwell at length on the mystic influence of the queen of aerial
phenomena--the rainbow. That influence in the past has been
immense; it still is, and ever will be, a power to be reckoned
with. Science cannot rob it of its glories. The gold-winged Iris
of Homer, swifter-footed than the wind, has passed. The
Genesis story of "the bow in the cloud" may dissolve in the
alembic of criticism--but the rainbow itself remains, still a
sevenfold bridge of souls from this soli