e mountain
slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of the
view by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatest
things are done from its own place, aloft. Thence does it distribute the
sun.

Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteries
than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception. Thence it
writes out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils
of the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, it
sheds deep colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the
hills, all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight.

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world. Its
own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve. It is
always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works
and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses--the painted
surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise
light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate
gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street.

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above some
little landscape of rather paltry interest--a conventional river heavy
with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;
and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists always
have it, with "autumn tints." High over these rises, in the enormous
scale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected--an heroic sky. Few
of the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be done
under such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days. It is for
an epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the
distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear and
cloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the
round world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are
unmeasured--you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the star
itself is immeasurable.

But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, with
conscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. Man would
not have known distance veritably without the clouds. There are
mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth are
pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are