feel a sense of blue colour as I face the strong breeze; the vibration
and blow of its force answer to that hue, the sound of the swinging
branches and the rush--rush in the grass is azure in its note; it is
wind-blue, not the night-blue, or heaven-blue, a colour of air. To see
the colour of air it needs great space like this--a vastness of concavity
and hollow--an equal caldron of valley and plain under, to the dome of
the sky over, for no vessel of earth and sky is too large for the
air-colour to fill. Thirty, forty, and more miles of eye-sweep, and
beyond that the limitless expanse over the sea--the thought of the eye
knows no butt, shooting on with stellar penetration into the unknown. In
a small space there seems a vacuum, and nothing between you and the hedge
opposite, or even across the valley; in a great space the void is filled,
and the wind touches the sight like a thing tangible. The air becomes
itself a cloud, and is coloured--recognised as a thing suspended;
something real exists between you and the horizon. Now full of sun, and
now of shade, the air-cloud rests in the expanse.

It is summer, and the wind-birds top the furze; the bright stonechat,
velvet-black and red and white, sits on the highest spray of the gorse,
as if he were painted there. He is always in the wind on the hill, from
the hail of April to August's dry glow. All the mile-long slope of the
hill under me is purple-clad with heath down to the tree-filled gorge
where the green boughs seem to join the purple. The corn-fields and the
pastures of the plain--count them one by one till the hedges and squares
close together and cannot be separated. The surface of the earth melts
away as if the eyes insensibly shut and grew dreamy in gazing, as the
soft clouds melt and lose their outline at the horizon. But dwelling
there, the glance slowly finds and fills out something that interposes
its existence between us and the further space. Too shadowy for the
substance of a cloud, too delicate for outline against the sky, fainter