On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky. There
you perceive that an ordinary sky of clouds--not a thunder sky--is not a
wall but the underside of a floor. You see the clouds that repeat each
other grow smaller by distance; and you find a new unity in the sky and
earth that gather alike the great lines of their designs to the same
distant close. There is no longer an alien sky, tossed up in
unintelligible heights above a world that is subject to intelligible
perspective.

Of all the things that London has foregone, the most to be regretted is
the horizon. Not the bark of the trees in its right colour; not the
spirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from the
parks; not the smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of soot; but
rather the mere horizon. No doubt the sun makes a beautiful thing of the
London smoke at times, and in some places of the sky; but not there, not
where the soft sharp distance ought to shine. To be dull there is to put
all relations and comparisons in the wrong, and to make the sky lawless.

A horizon dark with storm is another thing. The weather darkens the line
and defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly dims it,
or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky. The stormy
horizon will take wing, and the sunny. Go high enough, and you can raise
the light from beyond the shower, and the shadow from behind the ray.
Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer of
the eyes.

Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of some
compassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their sea. A
child on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces and sizes that they
cannot see in the Pacific, on the ocean side of the world. Never in the