Socrates. Come forth, come forth, ye dread Clouds, and to earth your glorious majesty show;
Whether lightly ye rest on the time-honored crest of Olympus, environed in snow,
Or tread the soft dance 'mid the stately advance of old Ocean, the nymphs to beguile,
Or stoop to enfold, with your pitchers of gold, the mystical waves of the Nile,
Or around the white foam of Mæotis ye roam, or Mimas all wintry and bare,
O hear while we pray, and turn not away from the rites which your servants prepare.
Then the chorus comes forward and answers, as if the Clouds were speaking:
Chorus. Clouds of all hue,
Now rise we aloft with our garments of dew,
We come from old Ocean's unchangeable bed,
We come till the mountains' green summits we tread,
We come to the peaks with their landscapes untold,
We gaze on the earth with her harvests of gold,
We gaze on the rivers in majesty streaming,
We gaze on the lordly, invisible sea;
We come, for the eye of the Ether is beaming,
We come, for all Nature is flashing and free.
Let us shake off this close-clinging dew
From our members eternally new,
And sail upward the wide world to view,
Come away! Come away!
Socr. O goddesses mine, great Clouds and divine, ye have heeded and answered my prayer.
Heard ye their sound, and the thunder around, as it thrilled through the petrified air?
Streps. Yes, by Zeus! and I shake, and I'm all of a quake, and I fear I must sound a reply,
Their thunders have made my soul so afraid, and those terrible voices so nigh—
Socr. Don't act in our schools like those comedy-fools, with their scurrilous, scandalous ways.
Deep silence be thine, while these Clusters divine their soul-stirring melody raise.
To which the chorus again responds. But we have not room for farther extracts. The description of the floating-cloud character of the scene is acknowledged by critics to be inimitable. There is one passage, in particular, in which Socrates, pointing to the clouds that have taken a sudden slanting downward motion, says:
"They are drifting, an infinite throng,
And their long shadows quake over valley and brake"—
which, MR. RUSKIN declares, "could have been written by none but an ardent lover of the hill scenery—one who had watched hour after hour the peculiar, oblique, sidelong action of descending clouds, as they form along the hollows and ravines of the hills. [Footnote: The line in Greek, which is so vividly descriptive of this peculiar appearance and motion of the clouds—
dia toy koiloy kai toy daseoy autai plagiai—