The story
On a dark night, a cloud drifting across the moon can glow bright along its edge. In 1634, John Milton put that sight into his masque Comus: “Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud / Turn forth her silver lining on the night?”
Sable means black. In the poem, the bright edge on a dark cloud is a sign of hope, and Milton’s “silver lining” stayed in the language as a picture of comfort hidden in gloom.
Two centuries later it became a proverb. In 1840, a Dublin magazine wrote that “there’s a silver lining to every cloud that sails about the heavens if we could only see it.” The tidy modern form, “Every cloud has a silver lining,” shows up in print by 1849.
Then an American writer gave it a push. In 1853, the popular columnist known as Fanny Fern opened an essay with the saying, and by the mid-1850s it was turning up in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.
