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 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