Out of doors, sometimes in the morning, deep in the valley, over the
tree-tops of the forest, there stays a vapour, lit up within by sunlight.
A glory hovers over the oaks - a cloud of light hundreds of feet thick,
the air made visible by surcharge and heaviness of sunbeams, pressed
together till you can see them in themselves and not reflected. The cloud
slants down the sloping wood, till in a moment it is gone, and the beams
are now focussed in the depth of the narrow valley. The mirror has been
tilted, and the glow has shifted; in a moment more it has vanished into
space, and the dream has gone from the wood. In the arms of the wind,
vast bundles of mist are borne against the hill; they widen and slip, and
lengthen, drawing out; the wind works quickly with moist colours ready
and a wide brush laying broadly. Colour comes up in the wind; the thin
mist disappears, drunk up in the grass and trees, and the air is full of
blue behind the vapour. Blue sky at the far horizon - rich deep blue
overhead - a dark-brown blue deep yonder in the gorge among the trees. I
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.
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