5. A Passage About Clouds

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 clamour 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—

Άλλ ́ έμενον, νεφέλησιν έοικοτες, άς τε

Κρονίων Νηνεμίης έστησεν έπ ́ κροπόλοιςιν ορεσσιν,

Άτρέμας, οφρ ́ εϋδησι μένος Βορέαο καί άλλων

Ζαχρηών άνέμων, οίτε νέφεα σκιόεντα

Πνοιήσιν λιγυρήσι διασκιδνάσιν άέντες·

Ώς Δανσοί Τρώας μένον έμπεδον, ούδέ φέβοντο.

‘But they stood, like the clouds which the Son of Kronos establishes in calm upon the mountains, motionless, when the rage of the North and of all the fiery winds is asleep.’ As I finished these lines, I raised my eyes, and looking across the gulf, saw a long line of clouds resting on the top of its hills. The day was windless, and there they stayed, hour after hour, without any stir or motion. I remember how I was delighted at the time, and have often since that day thought on the beauty and the truthfulness of Homer’s simile.

“Perhaps this little fact may interest you, at a time when you are attacked

for your description of clouds.

“I am, sir, your faithfully, “G. B. HILL.”