I am a man of domestic habits and very happy in my family and a few friends,
whose company I quit with reluctance to join other circles.
Luke Howard, February 1822

Study of clouds Goethe

 In 1812 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as Director of the Institute for Arts and Science in the Duchy of Saxony-Weimar, was active in trying to establish a network of stations for meteorological observation; a uniform grid for all data to be collected. It was the translation of Luke Howard’s paper appearing in Annalen der Physik in 1815 which drew his attention to the English meteorologist.

Goethe recognised the importance of Luke Howard’s scheme for naming clouds which chimed with his own interest in observing and recording the forms of clouds and provided the key to understanding nature which he had been seeking.

From Richard Hamlyn in The Invention of Clouds:
For Goethe the identification and naming of the clouds had done nothing less than transfigure mankind’s relationship with aerial nature. The clouds had been released into the scientific consciousness, from where they could reach further, into the realm of the pure intellectual spirit, as addressed in the last line of ‘Nimbus.’ The greatness of Howard’s classification, for Goethe, was that it accounted for the material forces of cloud formation while allowing for the immaterial forces of poetic response to be heard. And his poems, like the essay which preceded them, took the form of just such a response. Art could answer science, it could find within it not only a source of subject matter but a source of real inspiration. Goethe’s cloud poems, as reactions to an energizing scientific insight, were heartfelt, joyous and sincere.

Goethe’s personal study of clouds led him to want to know more about this young man whose studies had given him so much enjoyment. And in 1821 he asked JC Huttner at the Foreign Office to ask him to find out more about the meteorologist.

Once Luke Howard had been convinced by his friends that Goethe, the great German poet, philosopher and diplomat, really did want to know more about him and that the request was not a hoax, he wrote:
The celebrated writer, whom I thus for the first time and without economy address, is desirous, as I learn from his Friend in London, of having for the information of the German public, some account of the person who wrote the ‘Essay on the Modification of Clouds’. As no one is probably as well prepared to furnish, at present, what may be suitable for this purpose, as myself – and as there are several reasons why I should not withhold it now that the request has been made – a Memoir is subjoined which I have taken the liberty to write (as seems to be the most natural method) in the first person (having neither so much to say as Benjamin Franklin, nor so much to pass over as Julius Caesar).

The autobiography began:
I was born in (Red Cross Street) London, the 28th of the El.venth Month (November) 1772, and am respectably descended. By this I mean, that my Father, Robert Howard, my grandfather of the same name and, as far as I have been able to learn my great grandfather were persons of probity, respectable in their station as tradesmen or manufacturers and allied in marriage with persons having a similar claim to consideration…

On reading the few pages of autobiography which Luke Howard had modestly written, Goethe, at this stage an elderly man wrote:

For a long time nothing has given me so much pleasure as the autobiography of Mr. Howard, which I received yesterday and have been thinking of ever since. In truth nothing more pleasant could have happened to me than to see the tender religious soul of such an excellent man opened out to me in such a way that he has been able to lay bare for me the story of his destiny and development as well as his innermost convictions.

Although they never met, Goethe referred to Luke Howard as ‘Master’, the only Englishman he addressed thus.

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Goethe praised Luke Howard for:

bestowing form on the formless, and a system of
ordered change in a boundless world
and wrote these additional verses for him:

Atmosphäre
Die Welt, sie ist so groß und breit,
Der Himmel auch so hehr und weit,
Ich muß das alles mit Augen fassen,
Will sich aber nicht recht denken lassen.
Dich im Unendlichen zu finden,
Mußt unterscheiden und dann verbinden;
Drum danket mein beflügelt Lied
Dem Manne, der Wolken unterschied

Atmosphäre
The world’s enormous fact,
The pure height of the sky:
I grasp this with the eye
But it eludes my intellect.
When such infinity enshrouds
Analysis must needs be strong.
Thus it is my airborne song
Gives thanks to the “Namer of Clouds”.

Translation by Anthony Howell
Thank you to Nick Jacobs for the text of Atmosphäre,
the first part of Goethe’s Trilogy  to Luke Howard


For Part 2: In honour of Mr. Howard
Part 3: Also of Note coming shortly
and Goethe’s Introduction to the trilogy