into the top of the heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude.
The perspective of a cloud is a great part of its design--whether it lies
so that you can look along the immense horizontal distances of its floor,
or whether it rears so upright a pillar that you look up its mountain
steeps in the sky as you look at the rising heights of a mountain that
stands, with you, on the earth.

The cloud has a name suggesting darkness; nevertheless, it is not merely
the guardian of the sun's rays and their director. It is the sun's
treasurer; it holds the light that the world has lost. We talk of
sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the
illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic
of all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon is the bride, this is
the friend of the bridegroom.

Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is the most beautiful
of all. It has spaces of a grey for which there is no name, and no other
cloud looks over at a vanishing sun from such heights of blue air. The
shower-cloud, too, with its thin edges, comes across the sky with so
influential a flight that no ship going out to sea can be better worth
watching. The dullest thing perhaps in the London streets is that people
take their rain there without knowing anything of the cloud that drops
it. It is merely rain, and means wetness. The shower-cloud there has
limits of time, but no limits of form, and no history whatever. It has
not come from the clear edge of the plain to the south, and will not
shoulder anon the hill to the north. The rain, for this city, hardly
comes or goes; it does but begin and stop. No one looks after it on the
path of its retreat.