Every wind is, or ought to be, a poet; but one is classic and converts everything in his day co-unity; another is a modern man, whose words clothe his thoughts, as the modern critics used to say prettily in the early sixties, and therefore are separable.This wind, again, has a style, and that wind a mere manner.Nay, there are breezes from the east-south-east, for example, that have hardly even a manner.You can hardly name them unless you look at the weather vane.So they do not convince you by voice or colour of breath; you place their origin and assign them a history according as the hesitating arrow points on the top of yonder ill-designed London spire.
The most certain and most conquering of all is the south-west wind.
You do not look to the weather-vane to decide what shall be the style of your greeting to his morning.There is no arbitrary rule of courtesy between you and him, and you need no arrow to point to his distinctions, and to indicate to you the right manner of treating such a visitant.
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:
