Part 2 (1/2)

”And the scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun, and the moon, and the seven stars, and can tell me all about _them_, I believe, by this time; and how they move, and what they are made of.

”And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move, nor what they are made of. I can't move them any other way than they go, nor make them of anything else, better than they are made.

But I would care much and give much, if I could be told where this bitter wind comes from, and what _it_ is made of.

”For, perhaps, with forethought, and fine laboratory science, one might make it of something else.

”It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men's souls--such of them as are not gone yet where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them.

”You know, if there _are_ such things as souls, and if ever any of them haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be many about us, just now, displeased enough!”

The last sentence refers of course to the battles of the Franco-German campaign, which was especially horrible to me, in its digging, as the Germans should have known, a moat flooded with waters of death between the two nations for a century to come.

Since that Midsummer day, my attention, however otherwise occupied, has never relaxed in its record of the phenomena characteristic of the plague-wind; and I now define for you, as briefly as possible, the essential signs of it.

1. It is a wind of darkness,--all the former conditions of tormenting winds, whether from the north or east were more or less capable of co-existing with sunlight, and often with steady and bright sunlight; but whenever, and wherever the plague-wind blows, be it but for ten minutes, the sky is darkened instantly.

2. It is a malignant _quality_ of wind, unconnected with any one quarter of the compa.s.s; it blows indifferently from all, attaching its own bitterness and malice to the worst characters of the proper winds of each quarter. It will blow either with drenching rain, or dry rage, from the south,--with ruinous blasts from the west,--with bitterest chills from the north,--and with venomous blight from the east.

Its own favorite quarter, however, is the southwest, so that it is distinguished in its malignity equally from the Bise of Provence, which is a north wind always, and from our own old friend, the east.

3. It always blows _tremulously_, making the leaves of the trees shudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulness which gives them--and I watch them this moment as I write--an expression of anger as well as of fear and distress. You may see the kind of quivering, and hear the ominous whimpering, in the gusts that precede a great thunderstorm; but plague-wind is more panic-struck, and feverish; and its sound is a hiss instead of a wail.

When I was last at Avallon, in South France, I went to see 'Faust'

played at the little country theater: it was done with scarcely any means of pictorial effect, except a few old curtains, and a blue light or two. But the night on the Brocken was nevertheless extremely appalling to me,--a strange ghastliness being obtained in some of the witch scenes merely by fine management of gesture and drapery; and in the phantom scenes, by the half-palsied, half-furious, faltering or fluttering past of phantoms stumbling as into graves; as if of not only soulless, but senseless, Dead, moving with the very action, the rage, the decrepitude, and the trembling of the plague-wind.

4. Not only tremulous at every moment, it is also _intermittent_ with a rapidity quite unexampled in former weather. There are, indeed, days--and weeks, on which it blows without cessation, and is as inevitable as the Gulf Stream; but also there are days when it is contending with healthy weather, and on such days it will remit for half an hour, and the sun will begin to show itself, and then the wind will come back and cover the whole sky with clouds in ten minutes; and so on, every half-hour, through the whole day; so that it is often impossible to go on with any kind of drawing in color, the light being never for two seconds the same from morning till evening.

5. It degrades, while it intensifies, ordinary storm; but before I read you any description of its efforts in this kind, I must correct an impression which has got abroad through the papers, that I speak as if the plague-wind blew now always, and there were no more any natural weather. On the contrary, the winter of 1878-9 was one of the most healthy and lovely I ever saw ice in;--Coniston lake shone under the calm clear frost in one marble field, as strong as the floor of Milan Cathedral, half a mile across and four miles down; and the first entries in my diary which I read you shall be from the 22d to 26th June, 1876, of perfectly lovely and natural weather.

”_Sunday, 25th June, 1876._

Yesterday, an entirely glorious sunset, unmatched in beauty since that at Abbeville,--deep scarlet, and purest rose, on purple gray, in bars; and stationary, plumy, sweeping filaments above in upper sky, like '_using up the brush_,' said Joanie; remaining in glory, every moment best, changing from one good into another, (but only in color or light--_form steady_,) for half an hour full, and the clouds afterwards fading into the gray against amber twilight, _stationary in the same form for about two hours_, at least. The darkening rose tint remained till half-past ten, the grand time being at nine.

The day had been fine,--exquisite green light on afternoon hills.

_Monday, 26th June, 1876._

Yesterday an entirely perfect summer light on the Old Man; Lancaster Bay all clear; Ingleborough and the great Pennine fault as on a map. Divine beauty of western color on thyme and rose,--then twilight of clearest _warm_ amber far into night, of _pale_ amber all night long; hills dark-clear against it.

And so it continued, only growing more intense in blue and sunlight, all day. After breakfast, I came in from the well under strawberry bed, to say I had never seen anything like it, so pure or intense, in Italy; and so it went glowing on, cloudless, with soft north wind, all day.

_16th July._

The sunset almost too bright _through the blinds_ for me to read Humboldt at tea by,--finally, new moon like a lime-light, reflected on breeze-struck water; traces, across dark calm, of reflected hills.”

These extracts are, I hope, enough to guard you against the absurdity of supposing that it all only means that I am myself soured, or doting, in my old age, and always in an ill humor.

Depend upon it, when old men are worth anything, they are better humored than young ones; and have learned to see what good there is, and pleasantness, in the world they are likely so soon to have orders to quit.

Now then--take the following sequences of accurate description of thunderstorm, _with_ plague-wind.