poet. and rhetor.
1. The region of clouds; a ‘landscape’ of clouds.
1817. Coleridge, Sibyl. Leaves, Fancy in Nubibus. Go From mount to mount through Cloudland.
1866. Kingsley, Herew., I. Prelude 12. Such cloudlands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles.
1888. Pall Mall Gaz., 15 Sept., 5/2. Break-neck adventures into ‘Cloudland’ [in balloons].
2. fig. A region of fancy, myth or unreality.
1847. Lewes, Hist. Philos. (1867), II. 535. A yawning gulf of Scepticism, or a baseless cloud-land of Idealism.
1865. Parkman, Champlain, i. (1875), 170. To leave this cloudland of tradition, and approach the confines of recorded history.
