The Colour of Life | Page 7

and the mountains on earth appear or fade
according to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to foot, the
luminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that their
own local colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effaced
before the all-important mood of the cloud.
The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is the
cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of
spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate
revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground
shine.
Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and
partakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the mountain
slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of the
view by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatest
things are done from its own place, aloft. Thence does it distribute the
sun.
Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteries
than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception. Thence it writes
out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils of the

sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, it sheds
deep colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the hills,
all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight.
And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world. Its
own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve. It is
always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works
and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses - the painted
surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise
light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate
gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street.
Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above some
little landscape of rather paltry interest - a conventional river heavy
with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;
and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists always
have it, with "autumn tints." High over these rises, in the enormous
scale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected - an heroic sky.
Few of the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be
done under such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days. It is
for an epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What
are the distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the
clear and cloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near,
for the round world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear
sky are unmeasured - you rest upon nothing until you come to a star,
and the star itself is immeasurable.
But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, with
conscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. Man
would not have known distance veritably without the clouds. There are
mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth are
pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not overpowering by
disproportion, like some futile building fatuously made too big for the
human measure. The cloud in its majestic place composes with a little
Perugino tree. For you stand or stray in the futile building, while the
cloud is no mansion for man, and out of reach of his limitations.
The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely by keeping the

custody of his rays, but by becoming the counsellor of his temper. The
cloud veils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry ray,
suddenly bright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for a
background. Or when anger had but threatened, the cloud reveals him,
gentle beyond hope. It makes peace, constantly, just before sunset.
It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their colours. There is a
heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled
by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and
come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and
haphazard sky.
All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, and stands composed about it.
As the clouds marshalled the earthly mountains, so the clouds in turn
are now ranged. The tops of all the celestial Andes aloft are swept at
once by a single ray, warmed with a single colour. Promontory after
league-long