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.
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