Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Clouds
Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a Centaur, a Pard, or a Wolf, or a Bull?
Aristophanes—Clouds. Gerard’s trans. (Compare Hamlet. III. 2.)
Rocks, torrents, gulfs, and shapes of giant size
And glitt’ring cliffs on cliffs, and fiery ramparts rise.
Beattie—Minstrel. Bk. I.
I saw two clouds at morning
Tinged by the rising sun,
And in the dawn they floated on
And mingled into one.
John G. C. Brainard—I Saw Two Clouds at Morning.
Were I a cloud I’d gather
My skirts up in the air,
And fly I well know whither,
And rest I well know where.
Robert Bridges—Elegy. The Cliff Top. A Cloud.
O, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
Or let the easily persuaded eyes
Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould
Of a friend’s fancy.
Coleridge—Fancy in Nubibus.
Our fathers were under the cloud.
I Corinthians. X. 1.
Though outwardly a gloomy shroud,
The inner half of every cloud
Is bright and shining:
I therefore turn my clouds about
And always wear them inside out
To show the lining.
Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Mrs. A. L. Felton)—Wisdom of Folly.
The clouds,—the only birds that never sleep.
Victor Hugo—The Vanished City.
There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.
I Kings. XVIII. 44.
See yonder little cloud, that, borne aloft
So tenderly by the wind, floats fast away
Over the snowy peaks!
Longfellow—Christus. The Golden Legend. Pt. V. L. 145.
By unseen hands uplifted in the light
Of sunset, yonder solitary cloud
Floats, with its white apparel blown abroad,
And wafted up to heaven.
Longfellow—Michael Angelo. Pt. II. 2.
But here by the mill the castled clouds
Mocked themselves in the dizzy water.
E. L. Masters—Spoon River Anthology. Isaiah Beethoven.
Was I deceiv’d, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
Milton—Comus. L. 22.
There does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.
Milton—Comus. L. 223.
So when the sun in bed,
Curtain’d with cloudy red,
Pillows his chin upon an orient wave.
Milton—Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.
The low’ring element
Scowls o’er the darken’d landscape.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. II. L. 490.
If woolly fleeces spread the heavenly way
No rain, be sure, disturbs the summer’s day.
Old Weather Rhyme.
When clouds appear like rocks and towers,
The earth’s refreshed by frequent showers.
Old Weather Rhyme.
Clouds on clouds, in volumes driven,
Curtain round the vault of heaven.
Thomas Love Peacock—Rhododaphne. Canto V. L. 257.
Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it
Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.
Pope—Moral Essays. Ep. 2. L. 19.
Who maketh the clouds his chariot.
Psalms. CIV. 3.
Do you see yonder cloud, that’s almost in shape of a camel?
By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Methinks it is like a weasel.
It is backed like a weasel.
Or, like a whale?
Very like a whale.
Hamlet. Act III. Sc. 2. L. 312.
Yon towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds.
Troilus and Cressida. Act IV. Sc. 5. L. 220.
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
Shelley—The Cloud.
…feathery curtains,
Stretching o’er the sun’s bright couch.
Shelley—Queen Mab. Bk. II.
Far clouds of feathery gold,
Shaded with deepest purple, gleam
Like islands on a dark blue sea.
Shelley—Queen Mab. Bk. II.
…fertile golden islands,
Floating on a silver sea.
Shelley—Queen Mab. Bk. II.
Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance,
Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air,
Thy battlements hang o’er the slopes and the forests,
Seats of the gods in the limitless ether,
Looming sublimely aloft and afar.
Bayard Taylor—Kilimandjaro.
Yonder cloud
That rises upward always higher,
And onward drags a laboring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire.
Tennyson—In Memoriam. XV.
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.
Wordsworth—Ode. Intimations of Immortality. St. 11.
Once I beheld a sun, a sun which gilt
That sable cloud, and turned it all to gold.
Young—Night Thoughts. Night VII. L. 815.