"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 rôle 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 tendency 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."