CLOUD


During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to see the
clear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by the rest of
England, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clear
sky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London. You may go
for a week or two at a time, even though you hold your head up as you
walk, and even though you have windows that really open, and yet you
shall see no cloud, or but a single edge, the fragment of a form.

Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled glass
towards the sky when you open them towards the street. They are,
therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows were
used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or even knew so much
as whether there were a sky.

But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows.
Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it;
but the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round the
world. It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. The
terrestrial scenery--the tourist's--is a prisoner compared with this. The
tourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden, with
earth's diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. And for
its changes it depends upon the mobility of the skies. The mere green
flushing of its own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the
greater it must wait upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn are
inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a
cloud.