Weather and Weather Wisdom

“ Il me semble que personne n’aime autant tout que moi; . . . toutes les saisons, tons les états atmosphériques, la neige en hiver, les pluies d’automne, le printemps et ses folies, les tranquilles journées, et les belles nuits avec ses étoiles brillantes.” - MARIE BASHKIRTSEF.

man finds himself linked inseparably to those manifestations of nature’s processes which we call the weather: oscillations of heat and cold ; the succession of calm and storm, each with its varying interludes of sunlight, cloud, shower, rainbow, mist, fog, rain, snow, hail, and sleet. And although talking of the weather is popularly considered the refuge of the commonplace, a safe alternative to silence, the weather is, in “this kaleidoscopic medley of atoms in transient combination we call the earth,” not only essentially the one perennially interesting subject, but the one which of all others helps to keep alive poetry in a world tending more and more to prose.

The first strivings of the human mind after the relation of physical comfort or discomfort to outside causes must have been in the direction of awe, wonder, then curiosity, finally prescience, concerning the threat or promise of the weather. All early myth and folk-lore is penetrated by weather observation and weather poetry, as it might be called, for all rudimentary mythic conceptions gave personal identity to wind, cloud, sun, hail, and rain. More than this, some explanation of existing conditions which made the gods presiding over the weather sometimes favorable, and again threatening, to mortals, is generally to be found in the chronicles or legends of primitive peoples. For example, the Maoris have an elaborate myth recounting the passion of the sky for the earth, which resulted in a numerous progeny : the ocean, the wind, the forests, the hills, etc. Yet so tender and so clinging remained the intermingling embrace of these lovers that the offspring, dwarfed, crushed, denied free play, leagued together to push apart their father and mother : forests and hills rose between them, the ocean rushed in. Thus divorced from his spouse, the sky, bending low, often weeps and rages in convulsions of sorrow and of wrath, while the earth rends her breast, and her sighs in soft exhalations arise. Trained although moderns are to understand the general facts of physical science, this instinct to vitalize and personify the elements and every manifestation of force in nature still remains inherent in human minds. At any portent in the sky it is the imagination which first asserts itself: gods are in the storm, and certain similes of demons, dragons, giants, phantoms, which in the old mystic period of religion, with its belief in the conflict in the air of opposing spiritual forces menacing flesh and blood, came spontaneously to savage minds, still seem better to express the monstrous shapes of mists like Titans climbing the mountain side, the writhing column of a waterspout, the marshaling of clouds foretelling the approach of winter, even the flaming shafts of a stormy sunrise, than the scientific jargon of relative humidity, rotatory motion, atmospheric pressure, or optical phenomena. In fact, had meteorology been from the beginning of things established as a fixed science, with clear formulas of cause and effect, a powerful stimulus to thought and observation would have been lost, and all the arts would have missed a source of inspiration. And not even in an epoch of signal service bulletins founded on reports of the divergences of the weather over an entire continent, and a clear theory of the laws governing atmospheric currents and the phenomena of storms, is meteorology established as a fixed science. Where the weather is concerned, it is still the unexpected that happens, very much as it happened when weather wisdom was made up of the results of experience and intuition, and prediction still wore the garb of fancy. Indeed, in certain periods when the weather tries to sound all its stops, and to invent new combinations in the way of blizzards, cyclones, deluges of forty days and forty nights, frosts in May, or even halcyon calms or a stretch of idyllic spring in January, the merely scientific mind limps after it in vain. The blizzard of March, 1888, came without other warning than that of a peculiar appearance in the heavens on Sunday noon, as if a black band of cloud had been stretched across the zenith. The great snowstorms, attended by intense cold, which swept over the country last February, breaking the record of winter temperature all through the Southern States, were left chiefly to herald their own approach ; but this they did effectively with sun-dogs and halos round the moon so preternaturally luminous as to create a weird impression on the mind of the most casual spectator. The terrible gulf storms of August and October, 1893, were also unsignaled, except by the bulletins they sent forth in the great columns of vapor blown up from behind the southern horizon, twisted into marvelous shapes under the force of a violent wind which belonged only to the regions of the upper air. These clouds, resembling nothing so much as the steam from a boiling caldron, altered all the conditions of the atmosphere : hills and mountains seemed to soar to aerial heights ; there was a tremendous magnification of all distances ; any descent became a gulf. Even in this latitude, no one, after a glance at the sky, could have the faintest doubt that the weather was brewing mischief, yet the barometer failed to show any remarkable fluctuations.

It is this continued mystery concerning the operations of the weather in the face of every scientific device for comparing and noting each modification, change, and feature, which helps to keep alive a certain superstitious instinct. The oldest proverbs and prophecies still enjoy a lease of life : —

So on endlessly. And any modern weather prophet who undertakes to set down a schedule, so to say, of the weather for six months to come, foretelling on some particular date a storm of destructive fury, is certain to find hundreds of believers in his auguries; and on the morning of the predicted calamity not a few usually rational people will rise with a belief that something portentous is at hand.

The actual cause of those violent storms which come without warning seems to be that there are accidents in the upper atmosphere, due to the encounter of currents of unequal velocity and temperature, or of two or more areas of pressure moving in opposite directions, resulting in sudden and dangerous variations of wind, and in unusual precipitation of rain, hail, or snow.

Goethe, in one of his conversations with Eckermann, speaking of his strong faith in the barometer, remarks : —

“The thing is very simple, and I abide by what is simple and comprehensive without being disturbed by occasional deviations. High barometer, dry weather, east wind; low barometer, wet weather and west wind: this is the general rule. Should wet clouds blow hither now and then when the barometer is high and the wind east, or if we have a blue sky with a west wind, this does not disturb me or make me lose my faith in the general rule. I merely observe that many collateral influences exist, the nature of which we do not understand. . . . Nature has ever something problematical in reserve which man’s faculties are insufficient to fathom.”

Old sailors and fishermen on the seacoast, shepherds in hilly and mountainous regions, are instinctively weatherwise, and their least word is often worth more than whole volumes on the subject of meteorology. Men alongshore judge chiefly by the look of the horizon in connection with the direction of the wind and the turn of the tide. They also talk oracularly about the change of the moon. Landsmen observe the shape of the clouds in reference to the wind, the creeping up or down of mists, the comparative nearness or remoteness of certain points in the distance. Each wind has its own distinguishing characteristic. “ Beware of the butt end of a nor’wester and the tail end of a nor’easter,” they will say. Southerly winds are to be mistrusted, since they gather fury in a region where their progress is unrecorded save by disaster ; let the wind “ shift a p’int,” and it may be better calculated on. Scuds on the water foretell rain ; so does the descent of smoke from a chimney ; also light, fleecy morning vapors which take no shape; as well as “ mare’s -tails,” those plumy, radiating, far-off cirri which spread in two directions, showing contrary currents in the upper atmosphere.

Another bit of weather-lore in doggerel is, —

When the whole circumference of the heavens from horizon to zenith is filled with alternate waves of cloud and azure, so dappled and blended together, so light, foamy, aerial, that one’s sense is lost in watching the multitudinous luminous ripple, especially if the phenomena occur at night, with the moon irradiating the whole upper ocean,— that is a mackerel sky. Very sickly glittering stars ; very brilliant and very large stars; stars surrounded by a sort of nimbus; any kind of a circle or circles round the moon; also great shapes of vapor resembling the hulk of a ship, called by some “Noah’s Ark,”— all these signs and indications are declared by the wise to foretell bad weather, together with an infinity of other signs and other indications, all of which not unfrequently, in a dry time, exert their force in vain. “ Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of him which is perfect in knowledge ? ” asks Elihu of Job.

Borne forward as is the earth in the midst of the infinite heavens at a speed of more than a million and a half miles a day; penetrating a space filled with myriads of bodies, coexistent and related to it as it to them in the very constitution of law and matter; drawn hither and repelled thither by attractions, by perturbations; whirling on its axis at the rate, in this latitude, of about fourteen miles a minute ; balancing itself by the action of opposite forces, — we unimportant atoms on the earth’s surface, adhering to it only by virtue of its central attraction, in no wise essential to the general scheme of things, yet snatching thirstily at our little interval of time with a sense of its pathetic insignificance in the infinity of space and eternity, and discussing eagerly the Whence and Whither of the cosmic revelation, — we unimportant atoms, I say, should be presumptuous atoms if we considered that physics, laws of gravitation, attraction, rotation, and mutation, permitted the wisest to sum up the weather and its phenomena in a cut-and-dried formula.

That may be done for climate. Mrs. Hackit, for example, “ regulated her costume by the calendar, and brought out her furs on the first of November, whatever might be the temperature. She was not a woman to accommodate herself to shilly-shally proceedings,” — meaning the weather. Climate, in comparison with the weather, is simple as a question of the Rule of Three. Given a certain distance from the equator, a certain altitude, a certain relative position to the great seas, lakes, or mountains, and a certain average of dryness or humidity, heat or cold, is the result. The weather calls for quite a different set of propositions, and with the clearest equations its x, y, z, remain unknown quantities until practically realized. It has been said that climate is the rule, and weather the exception ; and indeed, the charm of the weather, like that of a woman, lies in its infinite variety. A good climate is an excellent thing to fall back on, like a small fixed income ; yet what gives even the best of climates its constant heightening of values, its changing harmonies of color and light, belongs to the bold, speculative spirit of the weather, always embarking on fresh venture and pushing innovation to its limit. A bad climate, on the other hand, may be said to be like a chronic disease, mitigated by the weather’s manifold possibilities of stimulus and solace, just as an arid region is sometimes raised into beauty by startling atmospheric effects. The weather has altered the whole face of the earth, it has altered history. Let the learned deal with glacial periods and other primitive upheavals, but what was the deluge except universal bad weather ? Was it not weather that conquered the Spanish Armada, preserved England and the Protestant faith, thus maintaining the balance of Europe, not to say throwing the weight of the scale on the side of modern progress? Was it not weather— Tolstóy and scientific historians notwithstanding— that conquered Napoleon in Russia ? Since, had he but consulted the storks and the cranes, in the autumn of 1812, — so the story goes, — he would have known that a winter of unprecedented cold was at hand ; for they broke up their households and flew south weeks before the time of their usual migration. A gleam of unexpected sunshine has precipitated epoch-making battles, and fog and rain, snow and hail, have fought for and against the side of the heaviest artillery. “Capt. January,”that powerful auxiliary of the Czar Nicholas in the war of the Crimea, was nothing but the weather. Arctic explorers could long ago have conquered all the difficulties offered by the arctic climate ; what defeats them is some unexpected combination of arctic weather. The subject of what malapropos bad weather has done for the private history of each one of us has never been gone into exhaustively, and it would require a separate chapter to give any adequate idea of how powerfully, in the way of lapsed opportunities and defeated climaxes, the weather preponderates as a factor in human success or failure.

Our civilization sometimes seems to be chiefly a defense against the weather, “ the heat o’ the sun ” and “ the furious winter’s rages; ” and what offered such ample leisure for those early mellow civilizations which girdled the happy Mediterranean to put their great thoughts into stupendous works of art was the fine climate. Was it because the Romans suffered from ennui that, not content with being masters of a world where sunshine and clear skies were the rule, and no exception, they were smitten by the desire to find out what was behind the fogs of Britain and the winds of Gaul and Germany, and, invading those gloomy regions of cloud, tempest, and ice, yielded up their secret of a fine climate to a clever enemy ? “ Climate,” by the way, comes from a Greek word, while “ weather,”bristling with every possibility which can make it the scourge of men, is Teutonic in its origin.

Is it necessary to say that the unequal distribution of land and water on the face of the globe, the irregularities of the earth’s surface, the earth’s daily revolutions, the succession of day and night, sunlight and darkness, causing fluctuations of temperature, all help to create those two powerful spirits of the weather, the vapor and the wind ? “ This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” Hamlet says, with one of those felicitous guesses at the mystery of things which discount the worth of arduous scientific discoveries. Seas, lakes, rivers, every pond and pool and marsh, all are alike constantly engaged in yielding up vapor. From each hollow, each ravine, ascends, palpably or impalpably, a mist. As soon as the sun declines from field, meadow, and lawn, the invisible atmospheric moisture, the presence of which is revealed only by the most delicate gauge, but which gives color to the grass, the flowers, the foliage, the blue bloom to the distance and to the air, becomes visible in the shape of dew, popularly supposed to descend from the skies. Should the air be colder than the grass, this moisture may arise in the shape of fog ; but if, as is usual in settled weather, the air remains warmer than the herbage, it takes the form of spheroidal drops on each blade of grass or leaf,

A rose drenched in dew, one of the loveliest of objects, is also a sure harbinger of a fine day, since dew is never developed except when the evenings are calm and clear, all indications normal. On cloudy or windy nights dew does not take shape, and the weather-wise, finding the grass dry at dawn, predict rain. Yet it must be added that an especially heavy white frost, which is merely frozen dew, the result of the operation to which we have alluded, called scientifically nocturnal radiation, is supposed to indicate a change of weather within forty-eight hours, probably a southerly storm.

From the fact that in most parts of the earth the atmosphere must always be more or less saturated with humidity, it is clear that any decrease in temperature, from change of wind or other cause, will make this humidity visible in the form of mist, fog, or cloud, which is a mere grouping of vapors in some clearly defined shape. Thus, sometimes, in a mountain region, one feels, while watching the mists boil up from the ravines and valleys as from a veritable witch’s caldron, as if one were admitted to the laboratory where weather is made. Some of these seething vapors, like wreaths of steam from a locomotive or factory engine, mount beautifully and majestically, maintaining color and form, until, dissipated by the sun’s rays or absorbed by the drier air, they disappear, and leave no trace. Again, they creep, they climb, they reach some point of vantage and take possession; gradually the valleys become a sea of fog ; the mountain peaks first loom, then seem to recede as they are by degrees swallowed up ; the sun grows unreal, its light fantastic, then is obscured. Mists do not invariably rise. Often, on the leeward side of one of the high peaks of a range, a transparent wreath of vapor will appear like a pennon, flutter for a time, then vanish. Now it is here, now it is gone ; but it comes again, and the watcher knows what it means. Certain mountains, like Pilatus at Lucerne, for example, may cover and uncover their heads without its meaning more than some local access of humidity ; but in any chain there is almost certain to be one elevation where the storm plants its white standard, then summons its hosts. Soon similar ragged fragments of mist follow all along the line; when these finally meet, merge, and descend, spreading a threatening mass over the landscape, the deluge is at hand.

These unceasing activities of vapor in its many forms are such obvious effective agents in making the storm and the whirlwind, it is not strange that from the earliest times they have powerfully impressed the imagination of men. The Old Testament is full of rich and poetic metaphors concerning the clouds. In the mythology of the Greeks the clouds became animate creatures, playing an active part in every-day existence. The greatest of gods and goddesses summoned clouds like chariots to transport them hither and thither; they appeared to mortals in the form of cloud, veiled their operations behind a cloud, and, watching the fortune of their favorite heroes in battle, encircled them in clouds and snatched them from danger. Clouds were indeed the favorite stage mechanism on Olympus. In the Clouds of Aristophanes, Socrates thus invokes them : “ O Sovereign King, immeasurable Air, who keepest the earth balanced, and blazing Ether, and sublime goddesses, ye Clouds of lightning and of thunder, arise, appear, dread queens, in midair, to your Thinker.” And again : “ Come, then, ye reverend Clouds, honor this neophyte with your dread beauty ! Whether upon Olympos’ holy snow-swept peaks ye sit, or in the gardens of father ocean weave the dance, or on the white eyries of Mimas, listen, receive our sacrifice, and be gracious to our rites.”

In fact, along with the mountains and the sea, clouds possess the attribute of lifting, transforming, and glorifying themselves into shapes of such wonderful sublimity that they give us perpetually a fresh creation to marvel at and rejoice in ; and (to quote Ruskin) “ there is added to this a spirit-like feeling, a capricious mocking imagery of passion, of life totally different, from any effects of inanimate form that the earth can show,” — all of which helped to lend a sort of probability to early myths that those vital yet elusive shapes harbored the operations of the gods.

To come back, however, to some realizable modern idea, let us take that of Shelley, who, with curious scientific accuracy as well as poetic felicity, says of the cloud : —

It is this incessant metamorphosis of the vapors in the atmosphere which gives us constantly a new heaven and a new earth ; no day the repetition of a vanished day, but each as it were redipped in the colors of living fire. Watch on successive fine mornings the first vibrations of color in the east, and no opal is so variable in hue. If yesterday the horizons showed a universal soft rose flash, to-day they were violet, and tomorrow may be pale primrose, yellow, or orange, or shading imperceptibly into mellow blendings of every tint. A year ago this summer, Jupiter and Venus, with the old moon at times making a third in the northeast, were set, dawn after dawn, against skies each day different, yet so exquisite in tone, so unerringly lovely, one felt involuntarily, "Who laid the corner stone thereof, when the morning stars sang together ? ” Yet this wealth of coloring was but a study of vapors playing their variations on the broken beams of light; vapors, rising, falling, held in suspense, their lease of existence depending on propitious or contrary air currents, relative humidity, and radiation. Compare the different aerial conditions of sunbeam, mist, and cloud which attend the sun’s setting, and awake not only a feeling of poetry, a kind of artistic perception, but an instant sense of what the foretokening may mean regarding the next day’s weather: a ball of fire seeming to burn on the far edge of the world, then to drop into a gulf of nothingness, leaving behind only a tawny and crimson glimmer; a dull orb holding up a screen of dun violet, through which it smoulders like a burnedout coal (one of the strange effects which the Japanese so easily transfer to their pictures) ; a luminary descending in an intolerable blaze of glory, absorbing into itself every ray of color and light, and leaving a pale primrose sky behind ; a heavy bank of clouds, from which the sun sinks hopelessly, then, the moment he is beneath the horizon, turns every wreath of vapor in the whole firmament to gold, rose, purple, or crimson.

Each of us recalls certain sunsets which continue to burn in the memory. Once, at Antwerp, watching from the window of a hotel near the Quai Van Dyck, overlooking the river and its lowlands, the flight of a shower which had come up late on an August day, I saw, through the thin rain which fell as if a mist of gold, the sun break forth from the heavy Storm clouds and emerge into an open space. Instantly all the many windings of the Scheldt between its pale green banks were changed to dazzling sheen, still seen through that thin, slow-dropping golden mist of rain. The piled-up vapors, retreating, gathered overhead as into a vast canopy with an intensely luminous lining, while the upper masses turned amber, tawny, and purple with veinings of crimson. Wider and wider opened the azure rift in the west as the tempest moved eastward, but still that same transparent shower of gold continued to fall between me and the sun, — a shining veil which hid nothing, yet transfigured every object, and caught up the masts and rigging of the shipping along the piers, and the many windings of the river, into a full tide of glory.

It is not alone the landscape which weather - effects can change as by the trick of a stage transformation scene. London on a misty morning, with the dome of St. Paul’s hanging in midair above the vapors ; Paris with its bridges and its towers half hidden in fog and rain, the gargoyles on the pinnacles of Notre Dame pouring forth streams of water, disclose new beauties, or become fantastic and unreal with aspects unappreciable in every-day schemes of form and color. Every New England village enjoys at least once or twice each winter a mystical transfiguration after a fall of snow which follows a slight rainfall, or an "ice-storm,” as a freezing rain is called, when every tree and shrub becomes a fairy structure, every twig and bough a wand made up of starry crystals. In fact, delightful as is fine weather, it becomes monotonous without the different effects which attend the coming and going of storms, etherealizing the everyday and familiar. Bad weather has such wonderful activities,—at once creator and destroyer as it is, — from retouching with color the emerald of fern and moss and the turquoise of Alpine forgetme-nots to lashing the sea into tempest. Lovers of sunshine and blue skies as we may be, we still best kindle into a sense of freedom at an encounter with storm and tempest. Take, for example, a day in mid-ocean, with the sea black, writhing, convulsed with fury, as if bound in fetters from which it longs to escape ; the sky alternately bright and obscured by misty scud, as from the windward a series of squalls come flying up, whitening the black waters as they strike, and sending before them a blinding mist of salt spray, until they break — a solid mass of wind and hail and rain and snow — upon the ship, which trembles and pitches to leeward, staggering like a wounded thing. When one squall has passed, and the sun shines again out of a vivid blue sky dappled with fleecy clouds, and only the changing colors in the horizon and the heaving yeast of the black waves show the danger past and the danger to come, we have a joy in the rush and roar of the elements ; the sense of a power rushing on uncurbed to do its will has lent us its quickening impulse. Let me quote a passage from George Meredith full of this tingle and thrill of exultation : —

“ Rain was universal: a thick robe of it swept from hill to hill ; thunder muttered remote, and between the muffled roars the downpour pressed on the land with a great noise of eager gobbling much like that of the swine’s trough fresh filled, as though a vast assembly of the hungered had seaten themselves clamorously and fallen on to meats and drinks in silence save of the claps. A rapid walker, poetically and humorously minded, gathers multitudes of images on his way. And rain the heaviest you can meet is a lively companion whom the resolute pacer scorns disdainful of wet clothes and squeaking boots. Southwestern rain - clouds are never long sullen ; they enfold and will have the earth in a good strong glut of the kissing overflow ; then, as a hawk with feather in his beak of the bird in his claw lifts head, they rise and take veiled feature in long climbing watery lines ; at any moment they may break the veil and show soft upper cloud, show sun on it, show sky, green near the verge they spring from, of the green of grass in early dew ; or along a traveling sweep that rolls asunder overhead, heaven’s laughter, of purest blue among titanic white shoulders ; it may mean fair smiling for a while or the lightest interlude, but the watery lines and the drifting, the chasing, the upsoaring, all in a shadowy fingering of form and the animation of the leaves of the tree pointing them on, the bending of the treetops, the snapping of branches, and the hurrahings of the stubborn hedge which wrestles with the flaws yielding but a leaf at most, and that on a fling, make a glory of contest and wildness without. Let him be drenched, but his heart will sing. The taking of sun and rain alike befits men of our climate, and he who would have the secret of a strengthening intoxication must court the clouds of the southwest with a lover’s blood.”

Love of the weather is, no doubt, like love of landscape, a modern sentiment, the beau-ideal of the ancients being a place

And it is perhaps our clearer apprehension of certain fixed laws of nature, our sense of practical conquest of the forces of the physical world, and, above all, our nineteenth-century contrivances for personal comfort which enable us to bring this enlargement of view, this æsthetic perception, into our enjoyment of any display of elemental force. Ignorant, superstitious, with a sense of being at the mercy of vindictive powers, the early peoples might well shrink and cower before experiences which thrill with rapture our blood and our brain. Indeed, in certain provinces of France, the churchbells are still rung during violent storms, to show the demons which are making mischief in the air that the celestial powers are being invoked. Throughout the Bible, there is everywhere shown, together with a high sense of the sublimity attending all its phenomena, a terrible dread of the wind, and prefigured in Revelation are “ four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.”

Of course we know that, in spite of its occasional devastating fury, nothing is actually so beneficent as the wind: that it results from the earth’s accumulation of solar energy; that without the wind the vapors encompassing the globe would cling like a pall, cold, dead, miasmatic ; that the wind is simply a rush of air towards a vacuum, thus maintaining the general equilibrium, since hot air must rise and cold fall, creating constantly local eddies which are influenced by, and influence in their turn, the two great upper currents to and from the equator and the poles.

That to the idea of wind can be linked images of vague horror may be seen in Claudio’s shuddering appeal : —

Yet in the zephyr which only stirs the poplar and the birch, in the breeze which fans and refreshes, and in the rising gale are stimulus and inspiration.

So Shelley wrote, under the intoxication of longing to become a part of the great onward sweep of the west wind. On a hot day in summer, when nothing moves under the untempered brilliance of sun and sky, when the leaves of the trees hang like the tongues of panting dogs, the first cool breath of air which turns the leaves of the willows hoary and makes the poplars silver brings a quickened impulse to existence. The gust may be but a passing sigh ; it may be the precursor of a general change of weather; it may be the herald of an advancing cyclone. From the summer solstice to the equinox, the great upper atmospheric currents, charged with electricity, come often into sharp encounter, creating the dangerous eddies which end in cyclones, hurricanes, and whirlwinds. It has already been observed that the shape and color of the clouds are most frequently the index to any powerful atmospheric disturbance, and before a real equatorial cyclone the cumuli become fantastic and threatening in form, taking on orange and crimson lights, throwing coppery reflections on sea and land, while round the horizon are to be observed bands of black cloud. The barometer (usually) begins to fall, and an oppressive calm along with a suffocating air helps to make the presence of something portentous felt. The cyclone which has been already revolving in the upper air descends. “ Jagged remnants of reddish or black cloud are borne furiously along by the tempest. An obscure mass becomes visible in the stormy part of the sky, and, increasing in size, gradually covers the firmament with a veil of darkness, often accompanied by a blood-red glitter. . . . The gusts which rend the air during the time the cyclone continues are said to create a noise like the roaring of wild beasts. . . . Generally speaking, the action of electricity is superadded to the violence of the air in motion ; flashes of lightning descend like sheets of flame.”

Of the ravages and disaster wrought by these terrible disturbances we know only too much, even in our latitude. “ Then the beasts go into dens, and remain in their places,” says the book of Job. “ Out of the south cometh the whirlwind : and cold out of the north.”

It is by experience of these cyclones, whirlwinds, blizzards, that we in some measure realize how we are but creatures of the atmosphere, over which we have no control, although by some knowledge of the general laws of its currents and their periodic disturbances and fluctuations we may be able not only to predict the approach of most storms, but to use judgment and discretion in choosing a place to live where comparative peace and safety may brood over the habitations of men. But this part of the subject is beyond our scheme. Sitting out on a summer’s night under the open heavens, with the translucent atmosphere left by the mellow sunset behind us, and facing the horizon, where already burns Mars, and rise one by one the constellations, we become curiously sensible of the rapidity of the earth’s motion as we dip to the east. The mind conceives the idea of our whirl through space with a high, exulting, fortifying sense of our being related to the great universal plan. But the inspiration of such moments can be only momentary. Finite we are, and we love the finite, and find our comfort in the nearness and the littleness of things. Great disasters and upheavals, like the Samoan storm, like the volcanic eruption which swallowed up Krakatoa, have their influence in keeping alive a sense of the contrast between our individual dream of the world and the universal plan. Do we not still remember vividly the sequel of the catastrophe of Krakatoa; how, through the autumn and winter, every sunrise and sunset, endlessly prolonged, was invested with strange and beautiful lights, trembling, palpitating, and burning over the sky,— not only rose and amber and orange and violet, but gradations of lucent colors without a name, half chrysoprase, half amethyst, never before seen except in the visions of the Apocalypse or the waving of the banners of the aurora borealis ?

Nevertheless, the truly precious signs to the lover of weather and of weatherlore are to be read in the aspects of earth and sky in every hour of the day and every day of the year. And certain writers who, within the circle of the horizon seen from their own windows, have noted and preserved every prognostic, every breath of change, every modification of the weather, its relation to their own habits, their own health, and the habits and health of their own fourfooted live creatures, to the coming and going and mating and nesting of the birds, the blossoming of the flowers, and the fruit and seedtime of harvest, like Gilbert White, Thoreau, Richard Jefferies. and others, have discovered the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin, and have gone far to secure immortality for themselves. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal is chiefly a chronicle of the weather : and her fervid sympathy for nature in every mood, for each subtle effect of passing light, each cloud whose shadow traveled across the mountains, each wind which ruffled the lake, made her the inspiration of two poets. If “ spring comes slowly up this way,” in the Lake Country, weather they have always there in full measure, pressed down and running over. Here are a few entries in the Journal, to which it was Wordsworth’s habit to turn as to his own commonplace book : —

“ Incessant rain from morning till night. . . . Sauntered a little in the garden. The blackbird sat quietly, its nest rocked by the wind and beaten by the rain.”

“ A fine mild rain. Everything green and overflowing with life, and the streams making a perpetual song along with the thrushes and all the little birds.”

“ A cold, dry, windy morning. . . . The waves round the little island seemed like a dance of spirits that rose out of the water.”

“ A rainy day. Coleridge intending to go. but did not get off.”

“ Tremendous wind. The snow blew from Helvellyn horizontally like smoke. W. came in late. He had been surprised and terrified by a sudden rushing of winds which seemed to bring earth and sky and lake together, as if the whole were going to inclose him.”

“The moon immensely large ; the sky scattered over with clouds; soon the sound of the pattering shower and fearful gusts of wind.”

“ W. and I drank tea at Coleridge’s. A cloudy sky ; the distant prospect obscured. The only leaf on the top of a tree, the sole remaining leaf, danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind.”

This leaf was destined to dance on forever, for it reappears in Coleridge’s Christabel : —

It is hardly strange that Shakespeare’s universal art, comprehending all nature, should embrace the most alert impressions about every kind of weather. His constant allusions to the seasons of the year, with their accompanying heat or cold, storm or calm, fall so easily into their places and are so unerringly true, we accept them with the same unconscious refreshment we experience in the unexpected view from a window opening upon a lovely landscape. The songs and sonnets in particular are penetrated by a sense not only of nature, but of the various meanings of the weather.

occur to the memory on the instant in speaking of the songs, while every subtile meaning of the sonnets is translated into images which seem to come from a consciousness steeped in a sense of the beauty of the exquisite pauses of a summer’s day, the meanings of the intervals between the seasons. What illustration could be at once so true yet so unexpected as this ?

Yet let Shakespeare refine as he may in cunning detail upon this sentiment of a summer’s day, an autumn sunset, a bright morning ending in tempest, the metaphor never surcharges the idea, only serves to deepen the single impression, Maeterlinck has with such inadequate sense of proportion been called the Belgian Shakespeare that one queries whether the comparison was made from his pressing into his service natural, or rather, supernatural effects, as in Princess Maleine, where the sky portents and the storm usurp the chief place in the drama.

When Shakespeare introduces the war of the elements, it is subordinated to human passions. Titania’s account of the bad weather which resulted from the quarrel between her and Oberon, frosts and floods and mists, making the seasons

is so true to nature that learned commentators have ransacked all meteorological lore to fix the date of the year which the poet has made so disastrous.

In The Tempest also is displayed a most absolute mastery of weather - effects, so minutely faithful to an actual experience of a storm at sea that again the critics have looked for book and chapter which contains a description of that particular tempest. It might indeed seem as if a Shakespearean society could find matter for a whole winter’s study in the question of whether Shakespeare himself was ever on the ocean. The probabilities, considering what we know of the period ami the unceasing activities of his not very long life, would appear to be against it, yet his knowledge of and his feeling for the sea are so comprehensive that one could find not a little to bear out the assertion that nothing in nature had so powerfully impressed his imagination, — not alone

but the “ multitudinous seas,” where

as if he had been actually rocked

Although splendid passages abound in Milton’s works describing natural effects, where

and Byron’s rhapsodies before storm and tempest have risen spontaneously to the lips of generations of men, and Shelley — aerial spirit that he was of fire and dew — colored the whole fabric of his poetry through and through with his intense perception of elemental beauty, Scott must yet be ranked next to Shakespeare in his power of giving with just one decisive touch the keynote of weather which throws lights and shadows upon his scene.

With Wordsworth and Tennyson began what might be called the weather cult; that is, the entire impenetration of the theme and motive with the moods of the atmosphere. Dickens may be said to have been the first novelist who pressed fog, wind, and rain into his action as distinctively as characters of flesh and blood ; arid this impressionism has since been carried to its extreme limit in certain books of Victor Hugo’s, Pierre Loti’s, Black’s, and Craddock’s. In Travailleurs de la Mer and Pêcheur d’Islande, what might be called the meteorological novel is raised to its apotheosis. Maupassant, although generally confining himself to pure dramatic motive, has, in one of his short stories, giving an account of a timid lad left alone all winter in a hut at the top of the Gemmi Pass in Switzerland, described the desolation of a world of snow and the freezing cold with the most striking effect. In fact, all literature, from the Œdipus Colouneus where the protagonist is summoned by the thunder to meet the gods, and the Odyssey where Ulysses is forced to contend with wind, seas, and waves roaring, down to the last new novel, — which “ gives us pause,” between the hero’s stammered words of love, to recount the rising of a cloud, the regathering of the winds, a sudden opening in the drift of billowy vapors revealing the moon in a quiet sky trembling with misty stars,— is more or less colored by the old indestructible instinct vitalizing and animating earth, air, fire, and water, seeing spirits frown in the cloud and smile in the sunshine.

Sculpture can find little motive in the incompleteness, the sense of transition, which characterizes the weather, and in painting, the pictures of Salvator Rosa, Gustave Doré, and others, in striving after the passion and intensity of overstriking natural effects, show that such attempts are apt to result in the bizarre. Some critics would say the same of the great Turner himself ; yet the wonderful force and vitality of his storms at sea are their own justification, while his Frosty Morning, and his countless, studies of Venice, London, and the Alps, under every possible aspect of sky and cloud, point to a clear knowledge of, beside an insatiable desire to fathom, the secret of all weather phenomena. Not a few painters have studied some single condition of the landscape, —a clear,lucid, wind-swept atmosphere, Indian summer haze, or gathering tempest; maintaining that special phase as the very essence of their whole work. No one more skillfully than Constable has used all the meaning of tossing clouds, contrasts of sunlight and shadow, to give his pictures the movement, drama, breath, and pulsation of life. Ruysdael knew nature’s own harmonizing secret, whether he depicted storm or calm, and Hobbema invariably expresses the sentiment of the weather; in tempest, his trees seem to feel the stir of the wind to their inmost trembling fibre. Corot painted first his skies, or, it might better be said, his clouds ; then so reflected their color in every detail of the landscape that no painter has ever, perhaps, so truly yet so unobtrusively succeeded in giving an impression of the passing influences of the weather. His pools not only image the skies, but tremble at the breath of the breeze; his trees shiver and sway; the very grass shows a premonition of change. Cazin, again, employs every mood of nature ; and to speak of Manet and Monet and Whistler is to suggest the trick of changing lights before storm, the flight of a shower across harvest fields, a beautiful phase of weather which is only a phase ; the subtly varied monotony of a glimmering, watery expanse under a great dusky sky, touched by the indefinable effluence, half smoke, half mist, which floats above cities. These vapory effects of weather give a large part of their charm to the landscapes of Diaz, Rousseau, Dupré, and, above all, Daubigny. Little as Millet used the landscape except as a background, often enough the painful toil of his peasants is accented by the gloom of the listless, empty sky, the low, hurrying, threatening clouds, and the herbage shuddering in the wind.

It is, however, to music, the concrete expression of harmonious motion, beyond the other arts, that we must turn to find definitely realized our conception of the free and spontaneous play of the elements, their turmoil and wild strife, their brooding and repose ; though not in the way of a definite description, bringing up a particular visible scene. It is true that Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony follows the variations of weather in a summer’s day, culminating in a shower, with flashes of lightning and thunderclaps ; and Chopin, in his Sixth Prelude, has refined upon the idea of dripping rain until we not only hear the drops, but feel their monotonous plash, and, as some one has said, smell the rain ; and in certain great compositions the motif of storm is repeated in endless iteration, and made, with other motives, a part of the dramatic movement. In spite of these instances, music has its distinctive way of reaching the imagination without attempting to imitate the effect of special sights or sounds. Indeed, although Beethoven, in the Pastoral Symphony, did translate his impressions of a June day into music, it was not his habit, nor did it accord with his belief that the chief function of music is to kindle the imagination beyond the effect of any outside sounds or symbols. Mozart confessed that he composed most spontaneously when traveling in a comfortable carriage, looking out at the landscape, while it was the way of Haydn to take for his theme the incidents of a summer excursion. Still, little as there is in the best music which requires to be labeled as meaning this or that particular thing, what can better express the rush and roar of a mighty wind through a forest than one of the fugues of Bach, starting with one voice, then the same measure repeated by another and another in succession, each constantly reappearing in fresh combination, until all unite and swell into one chorus ! Music’s wonderful translation of the deep stirring of our spirit before the forces of nature finds its symbol in tbe decoration of old-fashioned organs in remote French cathedrals, where angels, windy-winged, with far-blown hair, seem to float upon the breeze of harmonious sound.

The weather, flickering, unstable, inconsistent, walls us round with influences and impressions from our cradles to our graves ; its insignificantly little meanings appoint our lives and become the test of our rational behavior, as, for example, “ When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks,” while its greater meanings give us a quickened and multiplied consciousness of all that is beautiful and wonderful in created things. Perpetually renewing itself, weaving and unweaving its effects, like a Penelope undoing to-night what was toilsomely accomplished yesterday, it is always working out its own slow, careful processes, with one unfading result in view, — renovation, metamorphosis, resurrection.

Ellen Gluey Kirk.