Thus the Chaldean priest, to the brightness of the setting sun. Hear now the Greek girl, Myrrha, of his rising.
"The day at last has broken. What a night Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven! Though varied with a transitory storm, More beautiful in that variety:[7] How hideous upon earth! where peace, and hope, And love, and revel, in an hour were trampled By human passions to a human chaos, Not yet resolved to separate elements:-- 'T is warring still! And can the sun so rise, So bright, so rolling back the clouds into _Vapors more lovely than the unclouded sky_, With golden pinnacles, and snowy mountains, And billows purpler than the ocean's, making In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth, So like,--we almost deem it permanent; So fleeting,--we can scarcely call it aught Beyond a vision, 't is so transiently Scatter'd along the eternal vault: and yet It dwells upon the soul, and soothes the soul, And blends itself into the soul, until Sunrise and sunset form the haunted epoch Of sorrow and of love."
How often _now_--young maids of London,--do you make _sunrise_ the 'haunted epoch' of either?
Thus much, then, of the skies that used to be, and clouds "more lovely than the unclouded sky," and of the temper of their observers. I pass to the account of clouds that _are_, and--I say it with sorrow--of the _dis_temper of _their_ observers.
But the general division which I have instituted between bad-weather and fair-weather clouds must be more carefully carried out in the sub-species, before we can reason of it farther: and before we begin talk either of the sub-genera and sub-species, or super-genera and super-species of cloud, perhaps we had better define what _every_ cloud is, and must be, to begin with.
Every cloud that can be, is thus primarily definable: "Visible vapor of water floating at a certain height in the air." The second clause of this definition, you see, at once implies that there is such a thing as visible vapor of water which does _not_ float at a certain height in the air. You are all familiar with one extremely cognizable variety of that sort of vapor--London Particular; but that especial blessing of metropolitan society is only a strongly-developed and highly-seasoned condition of a form of watery vapor which exists just as generally and widely at the bottom of the air, as the clouds do--on what, for convenience' sake, we may call the top of it;--only as yet, thanks to the sagacity of scientific men, we have got no general name for the bottom cloud, though the whole question of cloud nature begins in this broad fact, that you have one kind of vapor that lies to a certain depth on the ground, and another that floats at a certain height in the sky. Perfectly definite, in both cases, the surface level of the earthly vapor, and the roof level of the heavenly vapor, are each of them drawn within the depth of a fathom. Under _their_ line, drawn for the day and for the hour, the clouds will not stoop, and above _theirs,_ the mists will not rise. Each in their own region, high or deep, may expatiate at their pleasure; within that, they climb, or decline,--within that they congeal or melt away; but below their assigned horizon the surges of the cloud sea may not sink, and the floods of the mist lagoon may not be swollen.