surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise
light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate
gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street.

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above some
little landscape of rather paltry interest--a conventional river heavy
with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;
and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists always
have it, with "autumn tints." High over these rises, in the enormous
scale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected--an heroic sky. Few
of the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be done
under such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days. It is for
an epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the
distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear and
cloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the
round world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are
unmeasured--you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the star
itself is immeasurable.

But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, with
conscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. Man would
not have known distance veritably without the clouds. There are
mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth are
pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are 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