Many a time have we seen at some little fishing village the fishermen all detained by some "breeder," or "flyer," whose meaning their eyes alone could read. If the threatened storm has not visited the coast, yet the heavy sea tumbling in without a breath of air has shown that the gale has broken not far distant. Still mistakes arise. Life is constantly sacrificed. But the glory and the pride of science is, that, whilst serving the sublimest ends, it still helps the humblest. We may be unable to control the elements. But we shall triumph over the law by obeying the law. The day will come when the notion of chance will be altogether eliminated, and the law by which the clouds are governed recognized. And in the blessings of science all men are partakers. Alike shall the fisherman steer his craft with a firmer faith in the essential goodness of all things, and the hand of the artist gain strength and his eye see a [{219}] deeper beauty when each knows that the clouds are as regular in their movements as the stars.
Of course men living by the sea, daily watching the clouds, life itself hanging upon a knowledge, however uncertain, of the meaning of their color and their shapes, have naturally named them in a rude fashion. Landsmen, who only now and then gaze at the clouds, are apt to regard them as ever changing. But not "a wisp" flies in the highest air, not "a creeper" rises out of the sea, whose shapes are not moulded by a definite law. Day by day the same forms repeat themselves with unceasing regularity. The clouds might be mapped out like the land and sea over which they fly. More than half a century has passed since Howard first gave them names. After him Forster wrote, and like him illustrated his theory with diagrams of the principal cloud-forms. And now Admiral Fitzroy has so improved upon their nomenclature, that there is not a cloud that cannot be scientifically named and defined. But our sailors and fishermen have long ago known these facts. Not a stray waif of film flecks the heavens which they have not christened. They know all kinds and shapes, from the "crow-nests," those tiny white spots (cirriti) dotting the sky, up to the glorious "Queen Anne's feather," waving far away into the horizon its soft downy plume, rippled and barred by the wind.
Thus to take a few examples. The North Yorkshire fisherman has his "dyer's neif," a small dark purple cloud, so called from its supposed resemblance to the black grained fist (neif) of a dyer. Some three thousand years ago, Elijah's servant, on Mount Carmel, cried that he saw a little cloud rising out of the sea like a man's hand. And still on the Yorkshire coast the fisherman utters the same language, and knows that cloud still as the forerunner of storm and rain. Quite as striking, too, is the way in which his names of clouds throw a light upon Shakespeare. All readers will remember the passage between Hamlet and Polonins, ending with "Very like a whale;" a phrase which has passed into a proverb for anything very improbable. And no actor can utter it on the stage without producing a peal of laughter. Yet the proverb and the laughter are equally inappropriate. The names of the clouds in the passage are all real names. The "dromedary cloud," or, as Shakespeare calls it, "the camel cloud," is well known to sailors. It is a species of cumulus, a white, packed, humped cloud, and when seen in the southern hemisphere is said to foretell heat; but, in the northern, cold. It is also called the "hunchback cloud." "See, there's the hunchback; look at its pads," North Country fishermen will say. The "weasel-cloud" also is known, though not so well, and is more often called "the hog-cloud" and the "wind-bog," from its being the forerunner of wind. But the "whale-cloud" is as well known to sailors, especially those employed in the Greenland trade, as the "bridge-cloud," or "feather-cloud," or any other well recognized form. "We shall hae a bit o' a puff, lads. See that sea-devil; and yonder's a regular finner to the norrard," have we heard North Sea captains say. A "finner," it should be explained, is a small whale. If ever there was a realist, Shakespeare was. He drew direct from nature. But, like a true artist, he knew how to mould and shape mere barren naturalism by the vitalizing power of the imagination. In its white heat he fused all things. And so, noting the common names of clouds as daily used in conversation by sailors and fishermen and seafaring folk, he could rise from the satire of Hamlet to the high pathetic pitch of Antony's speech:
"Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish;
A vapor, sometime, like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory.
With trees upon't, that nod into the world,
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast these signs;
They are black vesper's pageants.
Eros. Ay, my lord.
Antony.
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns; and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
Eros. It does, my lord.
Antony.
My good knave, Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body."
Anthony and Cleopatra, Act iv, Sc. 12.
Here the whole scene is colored by the imagination and ennobled by human pathos, such as no other man ever possessed. But the basis of the thought is the simplest naturalism, such as other men had seen and observed a thousand times before. The Flying Dragon is mentioned as far back as the latter part of the sixteenth century by Hyll in his "Contemplation of Mysteries," where the first rude ideas of weather forecasts may be found. The "pendent rock" and "forked mountain" are nothing more than the "rock-clouds" of the Derbyshire peasant, concerning which a local rhyme runs:
"When clouds appear like rocks and towers,
The earth's refreshed by fragrant showers."
We must not, however, lose sight of our North Country fisherman. If to him the sky is at times black with terror, yet it is also splendid with beauty. In fine weather it is his garden, the heavenly "meadow," as St. Chrysostom would say, blossomed over with flakes and garlands of cloud-bloom, white and peach-colored. He has his names for them, his "crow buds," and his "cherry flowers," and the great "tree cloud" with its purple branches. It is, too, his fairyland full of loveliest shapes flying and wandering here and there, "pigeons," as he calls those white detached winged "flyers," "flying fish," "streamers," and pencilled "plumes."
Thus far of the peasant and the sailor. They certainly more than any one else recognize the terror and the beauty of cloud scenery. The well-to-do man knows the clouds only as they affect his pleasures. Life is not dependent upon them, and he therefore misses that true enjoyment which springs from reality. On the whole, he thinks with the Epicurean that rain ought to fall by night, whilst his wife sighs for Italy and blue skies. But let us, on the contrary, love the grey cloud, and rather hold with that fine old skipper, who, after enduring six months of unbroken weather in the Bay of Naples, cried out on seeing a cloud, "Turn out, boys, turn out; here's weather as is weather; none of your everlasting blue sky." Let us rather love the storm-rack that beats against our island. This it is that gives the color to the cheeks of our maidens; this that has moulded our features, and deepened the lines of our faces, and hardened the national character.
Let us be thankful, with Mr. Raskin, that nowhere can the swiftness of the rain-cloud be seen as in England, nowhere in such perfection as among the Derbyshire hills; nowhere the keenness of the storm be felt as on a Yorkshire wold. [Footnote 36] But in these days even the power of the elements is threatened. We have seen in Derbyshire, when the west wind blows, the cloughs filled, not with troops of clouds dashing slantwise up the valleys, but choked with dull rolling Lancashire smoke; seen, under this canopy of fog, the snow on the Edges turn yellow and brown. One by one, too, the blast furnaces are burning up the Yorkshire moors. And instead of white wreaths of clouds crowning the wolds, a pillar of fire lights them up by night, and a cloud of smoke darkens them by day.