For one who has lived so much among the hills and loves the mountain
solitude it may seem strange to aver that the most uplifting and
enduring charm in Nature is to be found in amplitude of space. Low and
rolling lands give what no highlands allow. If in these the miraculous
surprise of cloud is a perpetual new element of loveliness, it is
loveliness itself that unfolds when an interminable land recedes from
an illimitable horizon, and, belonging to each and yet remote from
either, clouds hang like flowers, or drift like medusæ, or gather
mysteriously as white bergs in the pale azure of arctic seas.
We are apt to be deceived by the formal grandeur of mountains, by
the massed colours and contours of upbuilded heights, whether lying
solitarily like vast sleeping saurians, or gathered in harmonious,
if tumultuous, disarray. There is a beauty that is uniquely of the
hills. The mountain lands have that which no lowland has. But in
that company we shall not find what the illimitable level lands will
afford, what inhabits the wilderness, what is the revelation of the
desert, what is the lovely magic of the horizons of the sea. By the
sombre reaches of the Solway, in the fen-lands of East Anglia, in the
immensity of the great bog which cinctures Ireland, in the illimitable
lowland from Flanders to the last brine-whitened Frisian meadows, I
have seen a quality of aerial beauty that I have not in like loveliness
elsewhere found. Who that in mid-ocean has long watched the revelation
of distance and the phantasmagoria of cloud during serene days, or
from island shores looked across limitless waters till the far blue
line seemed lifted to the purple-shadowed bases of leaning palaces,
can think of an excelling loveliness? Who that has seen the four-fold
azure, in east and west, in north and south, over the desert, and
watched the secret veils of a single pavilion of rose-flusht cumulus
slowly be undone, till the vision is become a phantom, and the phantom
is become a dream, and the dream is become a whiteness and stillness
deep-sinking into fathomless blue, can forget that the impassive beauty
of the wilderness is more searching and compelling than the continual
miracle of wind-swept Alp and cloud-shadowed highland; that it has, in
its majesty of silence and repose, that which is perpetual on the brows
of Andes and does not pass from Himalaya?
Perhaps in sheer beauty of pictorial isolation clouds are most
lovely when viewed above sea horizons, from shores of islands, or
promontories, or remote headlands. In the South this beauty is possibly
more dream-like, more poignantly lovely, than in the North. Certainly,
I have nowhere known cloud beauty excelling that in the Mediterranean
and Ionian seas, viewed from the Spanish coast, from the Balearic
Isles, over against the mountain-bastions of Sardinia and Corsica, from
the headlands of Sicily, where Ithaka and Zante are as great galleys in
a magic ocean, where for weeks at midsummer the wine-dark waters are
untroubled between the cliffs of Hellas and the sands of Alexandria.
Perhaps. It is difficult to say of any region that there beauty is more
wonderfully revealed than elsewhere. It comes, and is present, and is
upgathered; as the wind, that has no home, that the shaken reed knows,
that crumbles the crests of ancient hills; as the rainbow, which is the
same aerial flame upon Helicon, upon Ida, on the green glen of Aghadoe,
on the steeps of Hecla in the Hebrides, that gives majesty and wonder
to the village green, and delivers mystery on the horizons of the
frequented common. It is like light, whose incalculable arrivals are
myriad, but which when most steadfast is most dreamlike, a phantom: as
moonlight on the mysterious upturned face of great woods; or as when,
on illimitable moors, the dew glistens on the tangled bent and pale
flood of orchis where the lapwings nest; or in golden fire, as when
at the solstice the sorrel in the meadows and the tansy in the wastes
and the multitude of the dandelion are transmuted into a mirage of red
and yellow flame; or in rippling flood of azure and silver, when the
daysprings loosen; or in scarlet and purple and chrysoprase, when the
South is as a clouded opal and the West is the silent conflagration
of the world. There is not a hidden glen among the lost hills, there
is not an unvisited shore, there is not a city swathed in smoke and
drowned in many clamours, where light is not a continual miracle, where
from dayset to dawn, from the rising of the blue to the gathering
of shadow, the wind is not habitual as are the reinless, fierce,
unswerving tides of the sea. Beauty, and Light, and Wind: they who are
so common in our companionship and so continual in mystery, are as
one in this--that none knows whence the one or the other is come, or
where any has the last excellence or differs save in the vibration of
ecstasy, or whither the one or the other is gone, when the moment, on
whose wings it came or on whose brows it stood revealed, is no longer
Eternity speaking the language of Time, but the silence of what is
already timeless and no more.
It has been said, less wisely than disdainfully, that the chief element
of beauty is destroyed when one knows the secret of semblance. Clouds,
then, are forfeit in loveliness when one knows the causes of their
transformation, their superb illusion? Not so. Has the rose lost in
beauty, has she relinquished fragrance, for all that we have learned
of her blind roots, the red ichor in her petals, the green pigment in
her stem, her hunger that must be fed in coarse earth, her thirst that
must be quenched in rain and dew, her desire that must mate with light?
Is the rainbow the less a lovely mystery because we know that it is
compact of the round, colourless raindrops such as fall upon us in any
shower? Is the blue of an unclouded sky the less poignant for us if we
know that the sunlight which inhabits it is there, not the yellow or
red or suffused white which we discern, but itself an ineffable azure;
that, there, the sun itself is not golden or amber or bronze, but
violet-blue?
I remember it was complained once of something I wrote ... in effect,
that cloud was the visible breathing, the suspended breath of earth ...
that the simile was as inept as it was untrue. None who knows how cloud
is formed will dispute the truth in similitude: as to disillusion,
can that be ‘unpoetic’ which is so strange and beautiful a thing? The
breath of a little child born in the chill of dawn, the breath of old
age fading into the soon untroubled surface of the mirror held against
silent lips, the breath of the shepherd on the hills, of the seamen on
dark nights under frost-blue stars, the breath of cows on the morning
pastures, of the stag panting by the tarn, the breath of woods, of
waters, of straths, of the plains, of the brows of hills, the breath of
the grass, the breathing of the tremulous reed and the shaken leaf ...
are not these the continual vapour of life; and what is cloud but the
continual breath of our most deep and ancient friend, the brown earth,
our cradle, our home, and our haven?
If any reader wish to _feel_ the invisible making of the cloud that
shall afterward rise on white wings or stream like a banner from
mountain-bastions, let him stand on the slopes of a furrowed hill
in this midsummer season. He will then feel the steady, upflowing
tide of the warm air from the low-lying glens and valleys, a constant
tepid draught, the breath of the earth. It will not be long before
the current which shook yonder rose-flusht briar, which swayed these
harebells as foam is blown, which lifted yonder rowan-branch and softly
trampled this bracken underfoot, is gathered by scaur and sudden corrie
to the sheer scarps of the mountain-summit, to be impelled thence, as
a geyser is thrown from an imperious fount, high into the cold and
windy solitude. There it may suddenly be transmuted to an incalculable
host of invisible ice-needles, and become cirrus; to float like
thistledown, or to be innumerably scattered in wisps and estrays, or
long ‘grey-mares’-tails,’ or dispersed like foam among vast, turbulent
shallows. Or it may keep to the lee-side of the mountain-summit, and
stretch far like a serrated sword, or undulatingly extend like a
wind-narrowed banner, covering as a flag the climbing armies of pine
and boulder and the inscrutable array of shadow.
_Cirrus_ ... what a beauty there is in the familiar name: what beauty
of association for all who love the pageant of cloud, and, loving, know
somewhat of the science of the meteorologist. It is not alone in this:
memory and imagination are alike stirred by the names of the three
other of the four main divisions of Cloud--the Cumulus, the Stratus,
the Nimbus. From the grey and purple of earthward nimbus to the
salmon-pink bastions of the towering cumuli, those unloosened mountains
of the middle air, those shifting frontiers of the untravelled lands
of heaven, and thence to the dazzling whiteness of the last frozen
pinnacles of cirrus, all loveliness of colour may be found. Neither
brush of painter nor word of poet can emulate those apparitions of gold
and scarlet, of purple and emerald, of opal and saffron and rose. There
every shade of dove-brown and willow-grey, every subterfuge of shadow
and shine, can be seen.
The cloud-lover will know that these four great divisions are but terms
of convenience. There are intervening children of beauty. Betwixt
the earth-held, far-reaching nimbus and the climbing cumulus, whose
forehead is so often bathed in the rarest fires of sunset, is the
cumulo-nimbus. Between the cumulus and the stratus, whose habitual grey
robe can be so swiftly made radiant in yellow and orange and burning
reds, is the strato-cumulus: a sombre clan in the upper wilderness,
heavy with brooding rains, moving in dark folds, less persuaded of
the great winds which may drive the as silent seeming stratus, some
ten thousand feet higher it may be, at the lightning speed of the
eagle. Between the stratus and cirrus there are the cirro-cumulus and
the cirro-stratus. The former is in one form as commonly welcome as
beautiful, the familiar ‘mackerel-sky,’ harbinger of fair weather--in
another, it is the soft dappled sky that moonlight will turn into the
most poignant loveliness, a wilderness of fleecy hillocks and delicate
traceries. The latter is that drift-ice or broken-up snow-field
enmassing which is so familiar. Both march from horizon to horizon in
ordered majesty, though when they seem like idle vapours motionlessly
suspended along the blue walls of heaven they are rustling their
sheaves of frost-fire armour, are soaring to more than twenty thousand
feet above the earth, and are surging onward with impetuous rush at the
rate of from seventy to eighty miles an hour.
I have called them the children of beauty. But these children of cloud
are many. In each division, in each subdivision, there is again complex
division. In a Gaelic story or poem-saga they are called ‘the Homeless
Clan.’ It is a beautiful name. But they are not homeless whom the great
winds of the upper world eternally shepherd, who have their mortal
hour in beauty and strength and force, and, instead of the havens and
graves and secret places of the creatures of earth, know a divine
perpetual renewal.