He prepares the dawn.  While it is still dark the air is warned of his presence, and before the window was opened he was already in the room.  His sun—­for the sun is his—­rises in a south-west mood, with a bloom on the blue, the grey, or the gold.  When the south-west is cold, the cold is his own cold—­round, blunt, full, and gradual in its very strength.  It is a fresh cold, that comes with an approach, and does not challenge you in the manner of an unauthorised stranger, but instantly gets your leave, and even a welcome to your house of life.  He follows your breath in at your throat, and your eyes are open to let him in, even when he is cold.  Your blood cools, but does not hide from him.

He has a splendid way with his sky.  In his flight, which is that, not of a bird, but of a flock of birds, he flies high and low at once:  high with his higher clouds, that keep long in the sight of man, seeming to move slowly; and low with the coloured clouds that breast the hills and are near to the tree-tops.  These the south-west wind tosses up from his soft horizon, round and successive.  They are tinted somewhat like ripe clover-fields, or like hay-fields just before the cutting, when all the grass is in flower, and they are, oftener than all other clouds, in shadow.  These low-lying flocks are swift and brief; the wind casts them before him, from the western verge to the eastern.

Corot has painted so many south-west winds that one might question whether he ever painted, in his later manner at least, any others.  His skies are thus in the act of flight, with lower clouds outrunning the higher, the farther vapours moving like a fleet out at sea, and the nearer like dolphins.  In his “Classical Landscape:  Italy,” the master has indeed for once a sky that seems at anchor, or at least that moves with “no pace perceived.”  The vibrating wings are folded, and Corot’s wind, that flew through so many springs, summers, and Septembers for him (he was seldom a painter of very late autumn), that was mingled with so many aspen-leaves, that strewed his forests with wood for the gatherer, and blew the broken lights into the glades, is charmed into stillness, and the sky into another kind of immortality.  Nor are the trees in this antique landscape the trees so long intimate with Corot’s south-west wind, so often entangled with his uncertain twilights.  They are as quiet as the cloud, and such as the long and wild breezes of Romance have never shaken or enlaced.

Upon all our islands this south-west wind is the sea wind.  But elsewhere there are sea winds that are not from the south-west.  They, too, none the less, are conquerors.  They, too, are always strong, compelling winds that take possession of the light, the shadow, the sun, moon, and stars, and constrain them all alike to feel the sea.  Not a field, not a hillside, on a sea-wind day, but shines with some soft sea-lights.  The moon’s little boat tosses on a sea-wind night.