Summer than the continual miracle of wind-swept Alp 



Clouds. an d 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 promon- 

 tories, 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 



170 



