The Colour of Life | Page 8

promontory of a stiller Mediterranean in the sky is called
out of mist and grey by the same finger. The cloudland is very great,
but a sunbeam makes all its nations and continents sudden with light.
All this is for the untravelled. All the winds bring him this scenery. It is
only in London, for part of the autumn and part of the winter, that the
unnatural smoke-fog comes between. And for many and many a day no
London eye can see the horizon, or the first threat of the cloud like a
man's hand. There never was a great painter who had not exquisite
horizons, and if Corot and Crome were right, the Londoner loses a
great thing.
He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high in air he loses its
shape. A cloud-lover is not content to see a snowy and rosy head piling
into the top of the heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude.
The perspective of a cloud is a great part of its design - whether it lies
so that you can look along the immense horizontal distances of its floor,
or whether it rears so upright a pillar that you look up its mountain
steeps in the sky as you look at the rising heights of a mountain that
stands, with you, on the earth.
The cloud has a name suggesting darkness; nevertheless, it is not

merely the guardian of the sun's rays and their director. It is the sun's
treasurer; it holds the light that the world has lost. We talk of sunshine
and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the
illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic
of all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon is the bride, this is the
friend of the bridegroom.
Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is the most beautiful
of all. It has spaces of a grey for which there is no name, and no other
cloud looks over at a vanishing sun from such heights of blue air. The
shower-cloud, too, with its thin edges, comes across the sky with so
influential a flight that no ship going out to sea can be better worth
watching. The dullest thing perhaps in the London streets is that people
take their rain there without knowing anything of the cloud that drops it.
It is merely rain, and means wetness. The shower-cloud there has limits
of time, but no limits of form, and no history whatever. It has not come
from the clear edge of the plain to the south, and will not shoulder anon
the hill to the north. The rain, for this city, hardly comes or goes; it
does but begin and stop. No one looks after it on the path of its retreat.

WINDS OF THE WORLD

Every wind is, or ought to be, a poet; but one is classic and converts
everything in his day co-unity; another is a modern man, whose words
clothe his thoughts, as the modern critics used to say prettily in the
early sixties, and therefore are separable. This wind, again, has a style,
and that wind a mere manner. Nay, there are breezes from the
east-south-east, for example, that have hardly even a manner. You can
hardly name them unless you look at the weather vane. So they do not
convince you by voice or colour of breath; you place their origin and
assign them a history according as the hesitating arrow points on the
top of yonder ill-designed London spire.
The most certain and most conquering of all is the south-west wind.
You do not look to the weather-vane to decide what shall be the style of

your greeting to his morning. There is no arbitrary rule of courtesy
between you and him, and you need no arrow to point to his
distinctions, and to indicate to you the right manner of treating such a
visitant.
He prepares the dawn. While it is still dark the air is warned of his
presence, and before the window was opened he was already in the
room. His sun - for the sun is his - rises in a south-west mood, with a
bloom on the blue, the grey, or the gold. When the south- west is cold,
the cold is his own cold - round, blunt, full, and gradual in its very
strength. It is a fresh cold, that comes with an approach, and does not
challenge you in the manner of an unauthorised stranger, but instantly
gets your leave, and even a welcome to your house of life. He follows
your breath in at your throat, and your eyes are open to let him in, even
when he