Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called weather—­beautiful and changeable as a woman.  The great English landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English) have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures.  They paint portraits of the weather.  The weather sat to Constable; the weather posed for Turner—­and the deuce of a pose it was.  In the English painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent.  The tall and terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground.  Rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen aganst a dark background, and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own.  Against a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks.  There is something strange about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch.  A bright blue sky is necessarily the high-light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers.  But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost red eyes of day, and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun.  Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless:  that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise.  Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white, or breaking into green or gold.  So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.—­“Daily News.”

[Sidenote:  G.K.  Chesteron]

Silence is the unbearable repartee.—­“Charles Dickens.”

[Sidenote:  G.K.  Chesterton]

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added.  Even for those who cannot do their work in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional.  But that is not the caution I mean.  The caution is this:  if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all.  I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick.  But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man.  If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.—­“Tremendous Trifles.”

[Sidenote:  G.K.  Chesterton]