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.

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