The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or fade
according to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to foot, the
luminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that their
own local colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effaced
before the all-important mood of the cloud.

The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is the
cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful
of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate
revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground
shine.

Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and
partakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the mountain
slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of the
view by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatest
things are done from its own place, aloft. Thence does it distribute the
sun.

Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteries
than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception. Thence it
writes out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils
of the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, it
sheds deep colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the
hills, all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight.

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world. Its
own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve. It is
always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works
and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses--the painted