What could a man learn by watching the clouds?

June 24.

The drifting white downy clouds are objects of a large, diffusive interest. Like all great themes, they are always at hand to be considered, or they float over us unregarded. They are unobtrusive. Far away they float in the serene sky, the most inoffensive of objects. What could a man learn by watching the clouds? The objects which go over our heads unobserved are vast and indefinite. They are among the most glorious objects in nature. They are the flitting sails in that ocean whose bounds no man has visited. A sky without clouds is a meadow without flowers, a sea without sails.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 24, 1852

June 24, 2012

The drifting white downy clouds . . . See June 4, 1855 ("Great white-bosomed clouds, darker beneath, float through the cleared sky and are seen against the deliciously blue sky, such a sky as we have not had before."); June 9, 1856 ("There are some large cumuli with glowing downy cheeks floating about"); June 11, 1856 ("Great cumuli are slowly drifting in the intensely blue sky, with glowing white borders”). Also January 13, 1852 (“Here I am on the Cliffs . . .I look up and they are gone, like the steam from the engine in the winter air. Even a considerable cloud is dissolved and dispersed in a minute or two, and nothing is left but the pure ether. Then another comes by magic, is born out of the pure blue empyrean, and now this too has disappeared, and no one knows whither it is gone.”); August 9, 1860 (". . . all at once a small cloud begins to form half a mile from the summit and rapidly grows in a mysterious manner till it drapes and conceals the summit above us for a few moments, then passes off and disappears northeastward just as it had come..Watching these small clouds forming and dissolving about the summit of our mountain, I cast my eyes toward the dim bluish outline of the Green Mountains in the clear red evening sky, and, to my delight, I detect exactly over the summit of Saddleback Mountain, some sixty miles distant, its own little cloud . . . a sort of fortunate isle in the sunset sky, the local cloud of the mountain.”)