Promontory after
league-long 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.
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