However, "clouds and cranes swim in the sky and crowds play in the sea" is not describing a natural landscape, but praising a leisurely, detached and superb calligraphy accomplishment.
From Liang Wudi Xiao Yan's "Comments on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ancient and Modern Scholars", the book about Zhong Wei is commented as follows: "Zhong You's books, such as clouds and cranes swimming in the sky and playing in the sea, are really sad." This article, referred to as book review or book review for short, was not quoted in ancient books before the Tang Dynasty, but first appeared in the book Wisdom of Sui Monks, the fifth volume of Chun Hua Wen Tie in the Song Dynasty.
This passage mainly describes the superb realm of Zhong You's (Changyuan's) calligraphy, which is appropriate in weight, combining rigidity with softness, strong and powerful, quaint and dense. The second couplet "Mei Yan Zao Xia" refers to the hot days in early summer dotted with summer, as opposed to the following "Wheat welcomes autumn". The word is steady and clever.
Extended data:
Wan Jing (1659— 174 1) was a scholar in Qing dynasty. The word "Grant One" is nine sands, named Xiao Lame Weng, the son of Yinxian (now Ningbo, Zhejiang).
In the forty-second year of Kangxi (1703), he was chosen as a scholar, Jishi Shu as an official editor and studied politics in Guizhou. He once participated in the compilation of large-scale official works such as Kangxi Dictionary, and later came back because of this incident.
Wan Jing extensively studied history and epigraphy, supplemented Wan Sida's Book of Rites with tens of thousands of words, confirmed Yan Hong's Shangshu Shuo, and reconstructed Wan Sitong's Chronology of Succession. Gong Lishu, the author of My Divorce from Li, died at the age of 83.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Wanjing