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—
ἐμπιπλῶν τροφῆς καὶ ἐυφροσύνης
τὰς καρδίας ήμῶν.
filling with meat, and cheerfulness, our hearts. The modern Greek should be—
ἐμπιπλῶν ἀνέμου καὶ ἀφροσύνης
τὰς γαστέρας ἡμῶν.
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—
Ἀλλ᾽ ἔμενον, νεφέλῃσιν ἐοικότες ἅς τε Κρονίων
Νηνεμίης ἔστησεν ἐπ᾽ ἀκροπόλοισιν ὄρεσσιν,
Ἀτρέμας, ὄφρ᾽ εὕδῃσι μένος Βορέαο καὶ ἄλλων
Ζαχρειῶν ἀνέμων, οἵ τε νέφεα σκιόεντα
Πνοιῇσιν λυγυρῇσι διασκιδνᾶσιν ἀέντες‧
Ὡσ Δαναοὶ Τρῶας μένον ἔμπεδον, οὐδ᾽ ἐφέβοντο.