England is pre-eminently a land of atmosphere. A luminous haze
permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives,
transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making
beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavement
become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are
shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than
precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be
loved without being possessed. Mists prolong the most sentimental and
soothing of hours, the twilight, through the long summer evenings and
the whole winter's day. In these country-sides so full of habitations
and these towns so full of verdure, lamplight and twilight cross their
rays; and the passers-by, mercifully wrapped alike in one crepuscular
mantle, are reduced to unison and simplicity, as if sketched at one
stroke by the hand of a master.
English landscape, if we think only of the land and the works of man
upon it, is seldom on the grand scale. Charming, clement, and eminently
habitable, it is almost too domestic, as if only home passions and
caged souls could live there. But lift the eyes for a moment above the
line of roofs or of tree-tops, and there the grandeur you miss on the
earth is spread gloriously before you. The spirit of the atmosphere
is not compelled, like the god of pantheism, to descend in order to
exist, and wholly to diffuse itself amongst earthly objects. It exists
absolutely in its own person as well, and enjoys in the sky, like a
true deity, its separate life and being. There the veil of Maya, the
heavenly Penelope, is being woven and rent perpetually, and the winds
of destiny are always charmingly defeating their apparent intentions.
Here is the playground of those early nebulous gods that had the bodies
of giants and the minds of children.
In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears
but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these
tender skies. Here the conflict between light and darkness, like
all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but
revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is
luminous and all is grey.
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