The Colour of Life | Page 9

is cold. Your blood cools, but does not hide from him.
He has a splendid way with his sky. In his flight, which is that, not of a
bird, but of a flock of birds, he flies high and low at once: high with his
higher clouds, that keep long in the sight of man, seeming to move
slowly; and low with the coloured clouds that breast the hills and are
near to the tree-tops. These the south- west wind tosses up from his soft
horizon, round and successive. They are tinted somewhat like ripe
clover-fields, or like hay-fields just before the cutting, when all the
grass is in flower, and they are, oftener than all other clouds, in shadow.
These low-lying flocks are swift and brief; the wind casts them before
him, from the western verge to the eastern.
Corot has painted so many south-west winds that one might question
whether he ever painted, in his later manner at least, any others. His
skies are thus in the act of flight, with lower clouds outrunning the
higher, the farther vapours moving like a fleet out at sea, and the nearer
like dolphins. In his "Classical Landscape: Italy," the master has indeed
for once a sky that seems at anchor, or at least that moves with "no pace
perceived." The vibrating wings are folded, and Corot's wind, that flew
through so many springs, summers, and Septembers for him (he was
seldom a painter of very late autumn), that was mingled with so many
aspen-leaves, that strewed his forests with wood for the gatherer, and

blew the broken lights into the glades, is charmed into stillness, and the
sky into another kind of immortality. Nor are the trees in this antique
landscape the trees so long intimate with Corot's south-west wind, so
often entangled with his uncertain twilights. They are as quiet as the
cloud, and such as the long and wild breezes of Romance have never
shaken or enlaced.
Upon all our islands this south-west wind is the sea wind. But
elsewhere there are sea winds that are not from the south-west. They,
too, none the less, are conquerors. They, too, are always strong,
compelling winds that take possession of the light, the shadow, the sun,
moon, and stars, and constrain them all alike to feel the sea. Not a field,
not a hillside, on a sea-wind day, but shines with some soft sea-lights.
The moon's little boat tosses on a sea-wind night.
The south-west wind takes the high Italian coasts. He gathers the ilex
woods together and throngs them close, as a sheep-dog gathers the
sheep. They crowd for shelter, and a great wall, leaning inland also,
with its strong base to the sea, receives them. It is blank and sunny, and
the trees within are sunny and dark, serried, and their tops swept and
flattened by months of sea-storms. On the farther side there are gardens
- gardens that have in their midst those quietest things in all the world
and most windless, box-hedges and ponds. The gardens take shelter
behind the scared and hurried ilex woods, and the sea-wind spares them
and breaks upon the mountain. But the garden also is his, and his wild
warm days have filled it with orange-trees and roses, and have given all
the abundant charm to its gay neglect, to its grass-grown terraces, and
to all its lapsed, forsaken, and forgotten dainties.
Nothing of the nature in this seaward Italy would be so beautiful
without the touch of man and of the sea gales.
When the south-west wind brings his rain he brings it with the majestic
onset announced by his breath. And when the light follows, it comes
from his own doorway in the verge. His are the opened evenings after a
day shut down with cloud. He fills the air with innumerable particles of
moisture that scatter and bestow the sun. There are no other days like
his, of so universal a harmony, so generous.

The north wind has his own landscape, too; but the east wind never.
The aspect which he gives to the day is not all his own. The sunshine is
sweet in spite of him. The clouds go under his whip, but they have
kinder greys than should be the colours of his cold. Not on an east-wind
day are these races in heaven, for the clouds are all far off. His rain is
angry, and it flies against the sunset. The world is not one in his reign,
but rather there is a perpetual revolt or difference. The lights and
shadows are not all his. The waxing and waning hours are disaffected.
He has not a great style, and does not convince the day.
All the four winds are brave, and not the less brave because,