In Skyland, the little helpless clouds dream dreams of great deeds that they might do upon the earth. But now and then some of them have aspirations so ridiculously high that they come to a discussion as to whether it is not really true that they are too innocent and beautiful to be of any usefulness, and that these longings are merely the foolish caprices of little infants.
One dark, rainy afternoon, as three tiny clouds were before the door of their tent looking over the dark sea, Cotton said:—
“Oh, dear! I do wish I could turn into a rainbow. Wouldn’t I be beautiful, all glowing in the twilight with my red and my yellow and my blue! Think how proud I should be, standing over the glorious mountain peaks! So much more glorious than all the water that these waves could ever wash!”
“It may be that the peaks could not be seen if you were reflected in all this water,” said Sprinkling; “think how black and hideous this sea is! People would want for ever to build roofs on their houses if the sky was covered with bright rainbows from morning till night.”
What this last little cloud said drew sorrowful conclusions, and made the others both serious and silent for a whole minute.
“Do you know,” then asked Tuft, “that great poet of earth who one day wrote these beautiful words:—
“‘E’en the tiniest cloud will imagine its own glory to be reflected in the smooth surface of a lake or on the smooth surface of a tranquil sea?’
This is so true that I have often wished to become such a cloud, to float like a ball upon the surface of these blue lakes, and be surrounded with such bower-like trees that sometimes the needle-like pines would shoot up and sometimes grow down into the water, just like church steeples, that you see reflected in the shady pool there at the edge of the mountains. Yes, floating high up in the sky and see myself floating so down below, how happy I should feel!”
The two little clouds were overcome with emotion at the sweet picture that the poet’s words had conjured up. But all on a sudden it became dark; a weighty cloud came racing against the sun, shutting out its glorious rays, and woke them up so that they became playful, and glided about motionless as yesterday’s snow.
At last the little clouds, the bright morsels of cotton wool, felt the longing and aspiration so intense that they sank into the sea of vapour without knowing it from below, where there are generally always large masses of cloud lumps that press against each other.
Then they woke up entirely; the oppressive weight had disappeared, and they soon felt themselves in genial bright daylight again.
“Oh,” sighed Tuft, “it was here the poet spoke of lovely fairy clouds, but now they are gone; now we do not see anything but dull, goitrous vapour, and these nasty miasmas of fetid air that rise from the earth. However, we shall soon come up above it all again.”
After a while they saw the indescribably beautiful, luminous vapour, without which the lower stratifications could not have existed majestic more blue, and they once more felt the genial light from above.
They three then had a little cry of “noisy joy which pained the earth beneath,” but that can be heard better in lonesome valleys than some crowded thoroughfare. They passed rapidly across the sky, and when they had played a too long time some minutes with the sun, they again ventured to approach nearer towards the earth.
“I have already found myself,” said Sprinkling. “I have treated some thirsty flowers. It is an unspeakable joy that there is still to be found some blessed flowers even in this unholy earth, where there is so much danger to fall into material sins.”
“I have been confessing,” said Cotton. “I felt myself obliged to relate all my former perhaps sinful longings in that it could arise when I wanted to become something difficult and loftily beautiful, a heart that elicits wondrous thoughts in the seeker after truth; and when my ambition wished to do good upon the earth, I looked upon it with my exploitive seeing eyes as the sea of giddiest passions. But here under the sun they knew nothing about such doubts. The summer will do, I was told.”
“And the summer will do,” repeated Sprinkling.
“Where there are no tears, human nature can give feeling to true repentance,” Croquet put in; and now they had nothing more to say, but that the earth ought to be forgiven for its sins.