There are natures of the mystical, contemplative order who seek instinctively to correlate their scenery with some mood or aspiration of their inner life⁠—who are not satisfied till they have linked it on somewhere intelligibly with their deepest being. Before a given landscape, that is, they find the explanation of their emotion by translating the colour, distance, conformation and so forth into definite spiritual sensations; passing thus, without too great confusion, from the finite to the infinite. Until this is successfully accomplished there is a sense of disquietude, almost of pain; the loveliness blinds. But, once that inner key is found, the result is peace; the beauty becomes comprehensible with a personal message as it were. They dramatise the View in the terms of soul: doors open; veils lift; there come⁠—wings. The kind of scenery that best does this varies, of course, with individual temperament. For some, the changing sea; for others, the monotony of great plains, or the mystery of forests; for others, again⁠—the majority, perhaps⁠—the grandeur and terror of mountains. But to all who understand this process of the mind the world appears as the expression of something spiritual and alive, and common objects become a source of very vivid revelation. Such persons endow “common objects” with something of their own life; nothing seems quite the same once their transforming imagination has looked upon it. The things they see, as Lotze puts it, “float off visions,” imperceptible to most; “even the dead weights and supports of buildings become changed into so many limbs of a living body, whose inner tensions pass over into themselves.” The essence of which intuition Blake has still better expressed: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing standing in the way.” To me, personally, however, it always seems that the kind of scenery which, more than any other, admits of this transformation, of this spiritual alchemy, is the scenery of cloud and sky. There is that about it which suffers the change without violence. It belongs, really, to the same category as the vast scenery of dreams⁠—to that which is phantasmal, protaean, infinitely fine; capable of interpreting the gentlest moods of the soul, as well as her great terrors. Cloud-scenery, especially when sketched against big mountains, has the two qualities of expressing immense power and exceeding delicacy: power, by means of sheer size, depth and grandeur of form; delicacy, by the silken tracery of the torn edges that float away into the viewless air. Cloud-scenery touches all notes in the scale, runs through the entire gamut of the soul’s emotions. The mind wanders delightlully beyond the confines of sense into the region of un-realities; but the solid background of the mountains brings it back again, and supports the substantial foundation from which such dreams may be indulged without foolishness. Fantasy, thus rooted in reality, is surely an exercise of the imagination that produces useful, not harmful, results. To be “in the clouds” among the mountains is an experience of value, but to be among the mountains, and above the clouds, comes to many as almost an entirely new revelation. The whole strange world of dreams slides across the frontier into waking life. The result is a kind of exquisite bewilderment. The immensity of cloud-scenery has already been noticed. Let the eye on a June day travel up and down the blue lanes of sky between the masses; and with the eye send also the imagination. The gradual comprehension of the piled and heaped-up vapours holds in the end something that appals. There is a touch of genuine awe in the impression produced by those slow-moving chains of Mist Mountains, strewn through half the circle of the sky shedding islands and promontories as they go, furrowed, cleft and peaked, their towered bulk forever changing. The imagination comes back tired and panting; “lost, dizzy, shelterless,” Shelley puts it, or thinking, perhaps of the line in the Hebrew poem: “Knowest thou the balancing at the clouds?” Yet this is only to see them from below. To see them from above (as in our illustrations) slashed and pierced by the ribs and shoulders ot the mountains beyond, seething in an ocean whose waves are silent and whose foam no wind can scatter, is to know an aspect of Nature in which the chief ingredient, as it seems to me, is sheer bewilderment. From some high peak to look down upon the world, silent, still, wrapped in this garment of unwoven mist, all hushed beneath thick curtains of vapour which presently the wind shall tear aside to show green valley and the houses of men, is to surprise Nature, as it were, in the most secret chambers of her loveliness.