Of all the things that London has foregone, the most to be regretted is the horizon.  Not the bark of the trees in its right colour; not the spirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from the parks; not the smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of soot; but rather the mere horizon.  No doubt the sun makes a beautiful thing of the London smoke at times, and in some places of the sky; but not there, not where the soft sharp distance ought to shine.  To be dull there is to put all relations and comparisons in the wrong, and to make the sky lawless.

A horizon dark with storm is another thing.  The weather darkens the line and defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly dims it, or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky.  The stormy horizon will take wing, and the sunny.  Go high enough, and you can raise the light from beyond the shower, and the shadow from behind the ray.  Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer of the eyes.

Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of some compassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their sea.  A child on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces and sizes that they cannot see in the Pacific, on the ocean side of the world.  Never in the solitude of the blue water, never between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, never between the Islands and the West, has the seaman seen anything but a little circle of sea.  The Ancient Mariner, when he was alone, did but drift through a thousand narrow solitudes.  The sailor has nothing but his mast, indeed.  And but for his mast he would be isolated in as small a world as that of a traveller through the plains.

Round the plains the horizon lies with folded wings.  It keeps them so perpetually for man, and opens them only for the bird, replying to flight with flight.

A close circlet of waves is the sailor’s famous offing.  His offing hardly deserves the name of horizon.  To hear him you might think something of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in the centre of it.

As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so steady, so swift, is the subsidence at your descent.  The further sea lies away, hill folds down behind hill.  The whole upstanding world, with its looks serene and alert, its distant replies, its signals of many miles, its signs and communications of light, gathers down and pauses.  This flock of birds which is the mobile landscape wheels and goes to earth.  The Cardinal weighs down the audience with his downward hands.  Farewell to the most delicate horizon.

HABITS AND CONSCIOUSNESS