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The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, a non-fiction book by John Ruskin |
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Lecture 2 (February 11, 1884) |
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_ LECTURE II (FEBRUARY 11, 1884) It was impossible for me, this spring, to prepare, as I wished to have done, two lectures for the London Institution: but finding its members more interested in the subject chosen than I had anticipated, I enlarged my lecture at its second reading by some explanations and parentheses, partly represented, and partly farther developed, in the following notes; which led me on, however, as I arranged them, into branches of the subject untouched in the former lecture, and it seems to me of no inferior interest. [Footnote 1: The vapor over the pool of Anger in the 'Inferno,' the clogging stench which rises from Caina, and the fog of the circle of Anger in the 'Purgatorio' resemble, indeed, the cloud of the Plague-wind very closely,--but are conceived only as supernatural. The reader will no doubt observe, throughout the following lecture, my own habit of speaking of beautiful things as 'natural,' and of ugly ones as 'unnatural.' In the conception of recent philosophy, the world is one Kosmos in which diphtheria is held to be as natural as song, and cholera as digestion. To my own mind, and the more distinctly the more I see, know, and feel, the Earth, as prepared for the abode of man, appears distinctly ruled by agencies of health and disease, of which the first may be aided by his industry, prudence, and piety; while the destroying laws are allowed to prevail against him, in the degree in which he allows himself in idleness, folly, and vice. Had the point been distinctly indicated where the degrees of adversity necessary for his discipline pass into those intended for his punishment, the world would have been put under a manifest theocracy; but the declaration of the principle is at least distinct enough to have convinced all sensitive and earnest persons, from the beginning of speculation in the eyes and mind of Man: and it has been put in my power by one of the singular chances which have always helped me in my work when it was in the right direction, to present to the University of Oxford the most distinct expression of this first principle of mediaeval Theology which, so far as I know, exists in fifteenth-century art. It is one of the drawings of the Florentine book which I bought for a thousand pounds, against the British Museum, some ten or twelve years since; being a compendium of classic and mediaeval religious symbolism. In the two pages of it, forming one picture, given to Oxford, the delivery of the Law on Sinai is represented on the left hand, (_contrary to the Scriptural narrative_, but in deeper expression of the benediction of the Sacred Law to all nations,) as in the midst of bright and calm light, the figure of the Deity being supported by luminous and level clouds, and attended by happy angels: while opposite, on the right hand, the worship of the Golden Calf is symbolized by a single decorated pillar, with the calf on its summit, surrounded by the clouds and darkness of a furious storm, issuing from the mouths of fiends;--uprooting the trees, and throwing down the rocks, above the broken tables of the Law, of which the fragments lie in the foreground.] [Footnote 2: These conditions are mainly in the arrangement of the lower rain-clouds in flakes thin and detached enough to be illuminated by early or late sunbeams: their textures are then more softly blended than those of the upper cirri, and have the qualities of painted, instead of burnished or inflamed, color. They were thus described in the 4th chapter of the 7th part of 'Modern Painters':-- "Often in our English mornings, the rain-clouds in the dawn form soft level fields, which melt imperceptibly into the blue; or when of less extent, gather into apparent bars, crossing the sheets of broader cloud above; and all these bathed throughout in an unspeakable light of pure rose-color, and purple, and amber, and blue, not shining, but misty-soft, the barred masses, when seen nearer, found to be woven in tresses of cloud, like floss silk, looking as if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf of lighted rain. "No clouds form such skies, none are so tender, various, inimitable; Turner himself never caught them. Correggio, putting out his whole strength, could have painted them,--no other man."] [Footnote 3: I did not, in writing this sentence, forget Mr. Gladstone's finely scholastic enthusiasm for Homer; nor Mr. Newton's for Athenian--(I wish it had not been also for Halicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself--through her death--and _to_ his own; while the subsequent refusal of England to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, has always been held by me the most ignoble, cowardly, and lamentable, of all our base commercial _im_policies.] [Footnote 4: 'Deepening' clouds.--Byron never uses an epithet vainly,--he is the most accurate, and therefore the most powerful, of all modern describers. The deepening of the cloud is essentially necessary to the redness of the orb. Ordinary observers are continually unaware of this fact, and imagine that a red sun can be darker than the sky round it! Thus Mr. Gould, though a professed naturalist, and passing most of his life in the open air, over and over again, in his 'British Birds,' draws the setting sun dark on the sky!] [Footnote 5: 'Like the blood he predicts.'--The astrological power of the planet Mars was of course ascribed to it in the same connection with its red color. The reader may be interested to see the notice, in 'Modern Painters,' of Turner's constant use of the same symbol; partly an expression of his own personal feeling, partly, the employment of a symbolic language known to all careful readers of solar and stellar tradition. "He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the association of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the death of multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply _crimsoned_ sunset skies. "The color of blood is thus plainly taken for the leading tone in the storm-clouds above the 'Slave-ship.' It occurs with similar distinctness in the much earlier picture of 'Ulysses and Polypheme,' in that of 'Napoleon at St. Helena,' and, subdued by softer hues, in the 'Old Temeraire.' "The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet and crimson, the deepest in tone of all that I know in Turner's drawings. "Another feeling, traceable in several of his former works, is an acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for labor, or knowledge, or delight, is passed forever. There is evidence of this feeling in the introduction of the boys at play in the churchyard of Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for his kite among the thickets above the little mountain churchyard of Brignal-bank; it is in the same tone of thought that he has placed here the two figures fishing, leaning against these shattered flanks of rock,--the sepulchral stones of the great mountain Field of Death."] [Footnote 6: 'Thy lore unto calamity.'--It is, I believe, recognized by all who have in any degree become interested in the traditions of Chaldean astrology, that its warnings were distinct,--its promises deceitful. Horace thus warns Leuconoe against reading the Babylonian numbers to learn the time of her death,--he does not imply their promise of previous happiness; and the continually deceptive character of the Delphic oracle itself, tempted always rather to fatal than to fortunate conduct, unless the inquirer were more than wise in his reading. Byron gathers into the bitter question all the sorrow of former superstition, while in the lines italicized, just above, he sums in the briefest and plainest English, all that we yet know, or may wisely think, about the Sun. It is the '_Burning_ oracle' (other oracles there are by sound, or feeling, but this by fire) of all that lives; the only means of our accurate knowledge of the things round us, and that affect our lives: it is the _fountain_ of all life,--Byron does not say the _origin_;--the origin of life would be the origin of the sun itself; but it is the visible _source_ of vital energy, as the spring is of a stream, though the origin is the sea. "And symbol of Him who bestows it."--This the sun has always been, to every one who believes there is a bestower; and a symbol so perfect and beautiful that it may also be thought of as partly an apocalypse.] [Footnote 7: 'More beautiful in that variety.'--This line, with the one italicized beneath, expresses in Myrrha's mind, the feeling which I said, in the outset, every thoughtful watcher of heaven necessarily had in those old days; whereas now, the variety is for the most part, only in modes of disagreeableness; and the vapor, instead of adding light to the unclouded sky, takes away the aspect and destroys the functions of sky altogether.] [Footnote 8: 'Steam out of an engine funnel.'--Compare the sixth paragraph of Professor Tyndall's 'Forms of Water,' and the following seventh one, in which the phenomenon of transparent steam becoming opaque is thus explained. "Every bit of steam shrinks, when chilled, to a much more minute particle of water. The liquid particles thus produced form a kind of water dust of exceeding fineness, which floats in the air, and is called a cloud." But the author does not tell us, in the first place, what is the shape or nature of a 'bit of steam,' nor, in the second place, how the contraction of the individual bits of steam is effected without any diminution of the whole mass of them, but on the contrary, during its steady _expansion_; in the third place he assumes that the particles of water dust are solid, not vesicular, which is not yet ascertained; in the fourth place, he does not tell us how their number and size are related to the quantity of invisible moisture in the air; in the fifth place, he does not tell us how cool invisible moisture differs from hot invisible moisture; and in the sixth, he does not tell us why the cool visible moisture stays while the hot visible moisture melts away. So much for the present state of 'scientific' information, or at least communicativeness, on the first and simplest conditions of the problem before us! In its wider range that problem embraces the total mystery of volatile power in substance; and of the visible states consequent on sudden--and presumably, therefore, imperfect--vaporization; as the smoke of frankincense, or the sacred fume of modern devotion which now fills the inhabited world, as that of the rose and violet its deserts. What,--it would be useful to know, is the actual bulk of an atom of orange perfume?--what of one of vaporized tobacco, or gunpowder?--and where do _these_ artificial vapors fall back in beneficent rain? or through what areas of atmosphere exist, as invisible, though perhaps not innocuous, cloud? All these questions were put, closely and precisely, four-and-twenty years ago, in the 1st chapter of the 7th part of 'Modern Painters,' paragraphs 4 to 9, of which I can here allow space only for the last, which expresses the final difficulties of the matter better than anything said in this lecture:-- "But farther: these questions of volatility, and visibility, and hue, are all complicated with those of shape. How is a cloud outlined? Granted whatever you choose to ask, concerning its material, or its aspect, its loftiness and luminousness,--how of its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You cannot have in the open air, angles, and wedges, and coils, and cliffs, of cold. Yet the vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across, like a tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels is the vapor pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?"] [Footnote 9: The opposed conditions of the higher and lower orders of cloud, with the balanced intermediate one, are beautifully seen on mountain summits of rock or earth. On snowy ones they are far more complex: but on rock summits there are three distinct forms of attached cloud in serene weather; the first that of cloud veil laid over them, and _falling_ in folds through their ravines, (the obliquely descending clouds of the entering chorus in Aristophanes); secondly, the ascending cloud, which develops itself loosely and independently as it rises, and does not attach itself to the hill-side, while the falling veil cloud clings to it close all the way down;--and lastly the throned cloud, which rests indeed on the mountain summit, with its base, but rises high above into the sky, continually changing its outlines, but holding its seat perhaps all day long. These three forms of cloud belong exclusively to calm weather; attached drift cloud, (see Note 11) can only be formed in the wind.] [Footnote 10: 'Glaciers of the Alps,' page 10.--"Let a pound weight be placed upon a cube of granite" (size of supposed cube not mentioned), "the cube is flattened, though in an infinitesimal degree. Let the weight be removed, the cube remains a little flattened. Let us call the cube thus flattened No. 1. Starting with No. 1 as a new mass, let the pound weight be laid upon it. We have a more flattened mass, No. 2.... Apply this to squeezed rocks, to those, for example, which form the base of an obelisk like the Matterhorn,--the conclusion seems inevitable _that the mountain is sinking by its own weight_," etc., etc. Similarly the Nelson statue must be gradually flattening the Nelson column, and in time Cleopatra's needle will be as flat as her pincushion?] [Footnote 11: 'Glaciers of the Alps,' page 146.--"The sun was near the western horizon, and I remained alone upon the Grat to see his last beams illuminate the mountains, which, with one exception, were without a trace of cloud. "This exception was the Matterhorn, the appearance of which was extremely instructive. The obelisk appeared to be divided in two halves by a vertical line, drawn from its summit half-way down, to the windward of which we had the bare cliffs of the mountain; and to the left of it a cloud which appeared to cling tenaciously to the rocks. "In reality, however, there was no clinging; the condensed vapor incessantly got away, but it was ever renewed, and thus a river of cloud had been sent from the mountain over the valley of Aosta. The wind, in fact, blew lightly up the valley of St. Nicholas, charged with moisture, and when the air that held it _rubbed against the cold cone_ of the Matterhorn, the vapor was chilled and precipitated in his lee." It is not explained, why the wind was not chilled by rubbing against any of the neighboring mountains, nor why the cone of the Matterhorn, mostly of rock, should be colder than cones of snow. The phenomenon was first described by De Saussure, who gives the same explanation as Tyndall; and from whom, in the first volume of 'Modern Painters,' I adopted it without sufficient examination. Afterwards I re-examined it, and showed its fallacy, with respect to the cap or helmet cloud, in the fifth volume of 'Modern Painters,' page 124, in the terms given in the subjoined note,[A] but I still retained the explanation of Saussure for the lee-side cloud, engraving in plate 69 the modes of its occurrence on the Aiguille Dru, of which the most ordinary one was afterwards represented by Tyndall in his 'Glaciers of the Alps,' under the title of 'Banner-cloud.' Its less imaginative title, in 'Modern Painters,' of 'Lee-side cloud,' is more comprehensive, for this cloud forms often under the brows of far-terraced precipices, where it has no resemblance to a banner. No true explanation of it has ever yet been given; for the first condition of the problem has hitherto been unobserved,--namely, that such cloud is constant in certain states of weather, under precipitous rocks;--but never developed with distinctness by domes of snow. [Illustration] But my former expansion of Saussure's theory is at least closer to the facts than Professor Tyndall's "rubbing against the rocks," and I therefore allow room for it here, with its illustrative wood-cut. "When a moist wind blows in clear weather over a cold summit, it has not time to get chilled as it approaches the rock, and therefore the air remains clear, and the sky bright on the windward side; but under the lee of the peak, there is partly a back eddy, and partly still air; and in that lull and eddy the wind gets time to be chilled by the rock, and the cloud appears, as a boiling mass of white vapor, rising continually with the return current to the upper edge of the mountain, where it is caught by the straight wind and partly torn, partly melted away in broken fragments. "In the accompanying figure, the dark mass represents the mountain peak, the arrow the main direction of the wind, the curved lines show the directions of such current and its concentration, and the dotted line encloses the space in which cloud forms densely, floating away beyond and above in irregular tongues and flakes." [Footnote A: "But both Saussure and I ought to have known,--we did know, but did not think of it,--that the covering or cap-cloud forms on hot summits as well as cold ones;--that the red and bare rocks of Mont Pilate, hotter, certainly, after a day's sunshine than the cold storm-wind which sweeps to them from the Alps, nevertheless have been renowned for their helmet of cloud, ever since the Romans watched the cloven summit, gray against the south, from the ramparts of Vindonissa, giving it the name from which the good Catholics of Lucerne have warped out their favorite piece of terrific sacred biography. And both my master and I should also have reflected that if our theory about its formation had been generally true, the helmet cloud ought to form on every cold summit, at the approach of rain, in approximating proportions to the bulk of the glaciers; which is so far from being the case that not only (A) the cap-cloud may often be seen on lower summits of grass or rock, while the higher ones are splendidly clear (which may be accounted for by supposing the wind containing the moisture not to have risen so high); but (B) the cap-cloud always shows a preference for hills of a conical form, such as the Mole or Niesen, which can have very little power in chilling the air, even supposing they were cold themselves; while it will entirely refuse to form huge masses of mountain, which, supposing them of chilly temperament, must have discomforted the atmosphere in their neighborhood for leagues."]] [Footnote 12: See below, on the different uses of the word 'reflection,' note 14, and note that throughout this lecture I use the words 'aqueous molecules,' alike of water liquid or vaporized, not knowing under what conditions or at what temperatures water-dust becomes water-gas; and still less, supposing pure water-gas blue, and pure air blue, what are the changes in either which make them what sailors call "dirty "; but it is one of the worst omissions of the previous lecture, that I have not stated among the characters of the plague-cloud that it is _always_ dirty,[A] and _never blue under any conditions_, neither when deep in the distance, nor when in the electric states which produce sulphurous blues in natural cloud. But see the next note. [Footnote A: In my final collation of the lectures given at Oxford last year on the Art of England, I shall have occasion to take notice of the effect of this character of plague-cloud on our younger painters, who have perhaps never in their lives seen a _clean_ sky!]] [Footnote 13: Black clouds.--For the sudden and extreme local blackness of thundercloud, see Turner's drawing of Winchelsea, (England series), and compare Homer, of the Ajaces, in the 4th book of the Iliad,--(I came on the passage in verifying Mr. Hill's quotation from the 5th.)
Previously, at page 10, in calling the molecules of transparent atmospheric 'absolutely' unreflective of light, I mean, in like manner, unreflective from their _surfaces_. Their blue color seen against a dark ground is indeed a kind of reflection, but one of which I do not understand the nature. It is seen most simply in wood smoke, blue against trees, brown against clear light; but in both cases the color is communicated to (or left in) the _transmitted_ rays. So also the green of the sky (p. 13) is said to be given by transmitted light, yellow rays passing through blue air: much yet remains to be known respecting translucent colors of this kind; only let them always be clearly distinguished in our minds from the firmly possessed color of opaque substances, like grass or malachite. [Footnote A: In speaking, at p. 11 of the first lecture, of the limits of depth in the rose-color cast on snow, I ought to have noted the greater strength of the tint possible under the light of the tropics. The following passage, in Mr. Cunningham's 'Natural History of the Strait of Magellan,' is to me of the greatest interest, because of the beautiful effect described as seen on the occasion of his visit to "the small town of Santa Rosa," (near Valparaiso.) "The day, though clear, had not been sunny, so that, although the snowy heights of the Andes had been distinctly visible throughout the greater part of our journey, they had not been illuminated by the rays of the sun. But now, as we turned the corner of a street, the chain of the Cordillera suddenly burst on our gaze in such a blaze of splendor that it almost seemed as if the windows of heaven had been opened for a moment, permitting a flood of _crimson_ light to stream forth upon the snow. The sight was so unexpected, and so transcendently magnificent, that a breathless silence fell upon us for a few moments, while even the driver stopped his horses. This deep red glow lasted for three or four minutes, and then rapidly faded into that lovely rosy hue so characteristic of snow at sunset among the Alps."]] [Footnote 15: Diffraction.--Since these passages were written, I have been led, in conversation with a scientific friend, to doubt my statement that the colored portions of the lighted clouds were brighter than the white ones. He was convinced that the resolution of the rays would diminish their power, and in _thinking_ over the matter, I am disposed to agree with him, although my impression at the time has been always that the diffracted colors rose out of the white, as a rainbow does out of the gray. But whatever the facts may be, in this respect the statement in the text of the impossibility of representing diffracted color in painting is equally true. It may be that the resolved hues are darker than the white, as colored panes in a window are darker than the colorless glass, but all are alike in a key which no artifice of painting can approach. For the rest, the phenomena of diffraction are not yet arranged systematically enough to be usefully discussed; some of them involving the resolution of the light, and others merely its intensification. My attention was first drawn to them near St. Laurent, on the Jura mountains, by the vivid reflection, (so it seemed), of the image of the sun from a particular point of a cloud in the west, after the sun itself was beneath the horizon: but in this image there were no prismatic colors, neither is the constantly seen metamorphosis of pine forests into silver filigree on ridges behind which the sun is rising or setting, accompanied with any prismatic hue; the trees become luminous, but not iridescent: on the other hand, in his great account of his ascent of Mont Blanc with Mr. Huxley, Professor Tyndall thus describes the sun's remarkable behavior on that occasion:--"As we attained the brow which forms the entrance to the Grand Plateau, he _hung his disk upon a spike of rock_ to our left, and, surrounded by a glory of interference spectra of the most gorgeous colors, blazed down upon us." ('Glaciers of the Alps,' p. 76.) Nothing irritates me more, myself, than having the color of my own descriptions of phenomena in anywise attributed by the reader to accidental states either of my mind or body;--but I cannot, for once, forbear at least the innocent question to Professor Tyndall, whether the extreme beauty of these 'interference spectra' may not have been partly owing to the extreme _sobriety_ of the observer? no refreshment, it appears, having been attainable the night before at the Grands Mulets, except the beverage diluted with dirty snow, of which I have elsewhere quoted the Professor's pensive report,--"my memory of that tea is not pleasant."] [Footnote 16: 'Either stationary or slow in motion, reflecting unresolved light.' The rate of motion is of course not essentially connected with the method of illumination; their connection, in this instance, needs explanation of some points which could not be dealt with in the time of a single lecture. It is before said, with reserve only, that "a cloud is where it is seen, and is not where it is not seen." But thirty years ago, in 'Modern Painters,' I pointed out (see the paragraph quoted in note 8th), the extreme difficulty of arriving at the cause of cloud outline, or explaining how, if we admitted at any given moment the atmospheric moisture to be generally diffused, it could be chilled by formal _chills_ into formal clouds. How, for instance, in the upper cirri, a thousand little chills, alternating with a thousand little warmths, could stand still as a thousand little feathers. But the first step to any elucidation of the matter is in the firmly fixing in our minds the difference between windless clouds, unaffected by any conceivable local accident, and windy clouds, affected by some change in their circumstances as they move. In the sunset at Abbeville, represented in my first diagram, the air is absolutely calm at the ground surface, and the motion of its upper currents extremely slow. There is no local reason assignable for the presence of the cirri above, or of the thundercloud below. There is no conceivable cause either in the geology, or the moral character, of the two sides of the town of Abbeville, to explain why there should be decorative fresco on the sky over the southern suburb, and a muttering heap of gloom and danger over the northern. The electric cloud is as calm in motion as the harmless one; it changes its forms, indeed; but imperceptibly; and, so far as can be discerned, only at its own will is exalted, and with its own consent abased. But in my second diagram are shown forms of vapor sustaining at every instant all kinds of varying local influences; beneath, fastened down by mountain attraction, above, flung afar by distracting winds; here, spread abroad into blanched sheets beneath the sunshine, and presently gathered into strands of coiled cordage in the shade. Their total existence is in metamorphosis, and their every aspect a surprise, or a deceit.] [Footnote 17: 'Finely comminuted water or _ice_.' My impression that these clouds were glacial was at once confirmed by a member of my audience, Dr. John Rae, in conversation after the lecture, in which he communicated to me the perfectly definite observations which he has had the kindness to set down with their dates for me, in the following letter:-- "4, ADDISON GARDENS, KENSINGTON, _4th Feb., 1884._ DEAR SIR,--I have looked up my old journal of thirty years ago, written in pencil because it was impossible to keep ink unfrozen in the snow-hut in which I passed the winter of 1853-4, at Repulse Bay, on the Arctic Circle.[A] On the 1st of February, 1854, I find the following:-- 'A beautiful appearance of some cirrus clouds near the sun, the central part of the cloud being of a fine pink or red, then green, and pink fringe. This continued for about a quarter of an hour. The same was observed on the 27th of the month, but not so bright. Distance of clouds from sun, from 3 deg. to 6 deg..' On the 1st February the temperature was 38 deg. below zero, and on the 27th February 26 deg. below. 'On the 23d and 30th (of March) the same splendid appearance of clouds as mentioned in last month's journal was observed. On the first of these days, about 10.30 a.m., it was extremely beautiful. The clouds were about 8 deg. or 10 deg. from the sun, below him and slightly to the eastward,--having a green fringe all round, then pink; the center part at first green, and then pink or red.' The temperature was 21 deg. below zero, Fahrenheit. There may have been other colors--blue, perhaps--but I merely noted the most prominent; and what I call green may have been bluish, although I do not mention this last color in my notes. From the lowness of the temperature at the time, the clouds _must_ have been frozen moisture. The phenomenon is by no means common, even in the Arctic zone. The second beautiful cloud-picture shown this afternoon brought so visibly to my memory the appearance seen by me as above described, that I could not avoid remarking upon it.
Your sky--altogether--may be composed of one or more of four things:--
And as I finally review the common accounts given of cloud formation, I find it quite hopeless for the general reader to deal with the quantity of points which have to be kept in mind and severally valued, before he can account for any given phenomena. I have myself, in many of the passages of 'Modern Painters' before referred to, conceived of cloud too narrowly as always produced by _cold_, whereas the temperature of a cloud must continually, like that of our visible breath in frosty weather, or of the visible current of steam, or the smoking of a warm lake surface under sudden frost, be above that of the surrounding atmosphere; and yet I never remember entering a cloud without being chilled by it, and the darkness of the plague-wind, unless in electric states of the air, is always accompanied by deadly chill. Nor, so far as I can read, has any proper account yet been given of the balance, in serene air, of the warm air under the cold, in which the warm air is at once compressed by weight, and expanded by heat, and the cold air is thinned by its elevation, yet contracted by its cold. There is indeed no possibility of embracing the conditions in a single sentence, any more than in a single thought. But the practical balance is effected in calm air, so that its lower strata have no tendency to rise, like the air in a fire balloon, nor its higher strata to fall, unless they congeal into rain or snow. I believe it will be an extreme benefit to my younger readers if I write for them a little 'Grammar of Ice and Air,' collecting the known facts on all these matters, and I am much minded to put by my ecclesiastical history for a while, in order to relate what is legible of the history of the visible Heaven. [Footnote A: I trust that Dr. Rae will forgive my making the reader better aware of the real value of this communication by allowing him to see also the following passage from the kind private letter by which it was supplemented:-- "Many years in the Hudson's Bay Company's service, I and my men became educated for Arctic work, in which I was five different times employed, in two of which expeditions we lived wholly by our own hunting and fishing for twelve months, once in a stone house (very disagreeable), and another winter in a snow hut (better), _without fire of any kind to warm us_. On the first of these expeditions, 1846-7, my little party, there being no officer but myself, surveyed seven hundred miles of coast of Arctic America by a sledge journey, which Parry, Ross, Bach, and Lyon had failed to accomplish, costing the country about L70,000 or L80,000 at the lowest computation. The total expense of my little party, including my own pay, was under fourteen hundred pounds sterling. "My Arctic work has been recognized by the award of the founder's gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society (before the completion of the whole of it)."]] [Footnote 18: 'You can't get a billiard ball to fall a shivering on its own account.'--I am under correction in this statement by the Lucasian professor of Cambridge, with respect to the molecules of bodies capable of 'epipolizing' light. "Nothing seems more natural than to suppose that the incident vibrations of the luminiferous ether produce vibratory movements among the ultimate molecules of sensitive substances, and that the molecules in return, _swinging on their own account_, produce vibrations in the luminous ether, and thus cause the sensation of light. The periodic times of these vibrations depend upon the periods in which the molecules are _disposed to swing_." ('On the Changes of Refrangibility of Light,' p. 549.) It seems to me a pleasant conclusion, this, of recent science, and suggestive of a perfectly regenerate theology. The 'Let there be light' of the former Creation is first expanded into 'Let there be a disposition of the molecules to swing,' and the destinies of mankind, no less than the vitality of the universe, depend thereafter upon this amiable, but perhaps capricious, and at all events not easily influenced or anticipated, disposition! Is it not also strange that in a treatise entering into so high mathematical analysis as that from which I quote, the false word 'swing,' expressing the action of a body liable to continuous arrest by gravitation, should be employed to signify the oscillation, wholly unaffected by gravity, of substance in which the motion once originated, may cease only with the essence of the body? It is true that in men of high scientific caliber, such as the writer in this instance, carelessness in expression does not affect the security of their conclusions. But in men of lower rank, mental defects in language indicate fatal flaws in thought. And although the constant habit to which I owe my (often foolishly praised) "command of language"--of never allowing a sentence to pass proof in which I have not considered whether, for the vital word in it, a better could be found in the dictionary, makes me somewhat morbidly intolerant of careless diction, it may be taken for an extremely useful and practical rule, that if a man can think clearly he will write well, and that no good science was ever written in bad English. So that, before you consider whether a scientific author says a true or a false thing, you had better first look if he is able properly to say _any_thing,--and secondly, whether his conceit permits him to say anything properly. Thus, when Professor Tyndall, endeavoring to write poetically of the sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are his workmanship," you may observe, first, that since the sun is not a man, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurative statement that he rejoices _as_ a strong man to run his course, is one which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting. And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even in that figurative sense, the lilies of the field are the sun's workmanship, in the same sense the lilies of the hothouse are the stove's workmanship,--and in perfectly logical parallel, you, who are alive here to listen to me, because you have been warmed and fed through the winter, are the workmanship of your own coal-scuttles. Again, when Mr. Balfour Stewart begins a treatise on the 'Conservation of Energy,' which is to conclude, as we shall see presently, with the prophecy of its total extinction as far as the present world is concerned,--by clothing in a "properly scientific garb," our innocent impression that there is some difference between the blow of a rifle stock and a rifle ball; he prepares for the scientific toilet by telling us in italics that "the something which the rifle ball possesses in contradistinction to the rifle stock is clearly the power of overcoming resistance," since "it can penetrate through oak-wood or through water--or (alas! that it should be so often tried) through the human body; and _this power of penetration_" (italics now mine) "_is the distinguishing characteristic of a substance moving with very great velocity_. Let us define by the term 'Energy,' this power which the rifle ball possesses of overcoming obstacles, or of doing work." Now, had Mr. Stewart been a better scholar, he would have felt, even if he had not known, that the Greek word 'energy' could only be applied to the living--and of living, with perfect propriety only to the _mental_, action of animals, and that it could no more be applied as a 'scientific garb,' to the flight of a rifle ball, than to the fall of a dead body. And, if he had attained thus much, even of the science of language, it is just possible that the small forte and faculty of thought he himself possesses might have been energized so far as to perceive that the force of all inertly moving bodies, whether rifle stock, rifle ball, or rolling world, is under precisely one and the same relation to their weights and velocities; that the effect of their impact depends--not merely on their pace, but their constitution; and on the relative forms and stability of the substances they encounter, and that there is no more quality of Energy, though much less quality of Art, in the swiftly penetrating shot, or crushing ball, than in the deliberately contemplative and administrative puncture by a gnat's proboscis, or a seamstress' needle. Mistakes of this kind, beginning with affectations of diction, do not always invalidate general statements or conclusions,--for a bad writer often equivocates out of a blunder as he equivocates into one,--but I have been strict in pointing out the confusions of idea admitted in scientific books between the movement of a swing, that of a sounding violin chord, and that of an agitated liquid, because these confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keep the scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glacier motion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultant quantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacial erosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely undo the damage.] [Footnote 19: 'Force and pace.'--Among the nearer questions which the careless terminology on which I have dwelt in the above note has left unsettled, I believe the reader will be surprised, as much as I am myself, to find that of the mode of impulse in a common gust of wind! Whence is its strength communicated to it, and how gathered in it? and what is the difference of manner in the impulse between compressible gas and incompressible fluid? For instance: The water at the head of a weir is passing every instant from slower into quicker motion; but (until broken in the air) the fast flowing water is just as dense as the slowly flowing water. But a fan alternately compresses and rarefies the air between it and the cheek, and the violence of a destructive gust in a gale of wind means a momentary increase in velocity and density of which I cannot myself in the least explain,--and find in no book on dynamics explained,--the mechanical causation. The following letter, from a friend whose observations on natural history for the last seven or eight years have been consistently valuable and instructive to me, will be found, with that subjoined in the note, in various ways interesting; but especially in its notice of the inefficiency of ordinary instrumental registry in such matters:-- "6, MOIRA PLACE, SOUTHAMPTON, _Feb. 8th, 1884_. DEAR MR. RUSKIN,--Some time since I troubled you with a note or two about sea-birds, etc.... but perhaps I should never have ventured to trouble you again, had not your lecture on the 'Storm Clouds' touched a subject which has deeply interested me for years past. I had, of course, no idea that you had noticed this thing, though I might have known that, living the life you do, you must have done so. As for me, it has been a source of perplexity for years: so much so, that I began to wonder at times whether I was not under some mental delusion about it, until the strange theatrical displays, of the last few months, for which I was more or less prepared, led so many to use their eyes, unmuzzled by brass or glass, for a time. I know you do not bother, or care much to read newspapers, but I have taken the liberty of cutting out and sending a letter of mine, sent on the 1st January to an evening paper,[A] upon this subject, thinking you might like to know that one person, at any rate, has seen that strange, bleared look about the sun, shining so seldom except through a ghastly glare of pale, persistent haze. May it be that the singular coloring of the sunsets marks an end of this long period of plague-cloud, and that in them we have promise of steadier weather? (No: those sunsets were entirely distinct phenomena, and promised, if anything, only evil.--R.) I was glad to see that in your lecture you gave the dependants upon the instrument-makers a warning. On the 26th I had a heavy sailing-boat lifted and blown, from where she lay hauled up, a distance of four feet, which, as the boat has four hundred-weight of iron upon her keel, gives a wind-gust, or force, not easily measured by instruments.
Take, for simplest and nearest example, this question of the stress of wind. It is not the actual _power_ that is immeasurable, if only it would stand to be measured! Instruments could easily now be invented which would register not only a blast that could lift a sailing boat, but one that would sink a ship of the line. But, lucklessly--the blast won't pose to the instrument! nor can the instrument be adjusted to the blast. In the gale of which my friend speaks in his next letter, 26th January, a gust came down the hill above Coniston village upon two old oaks, which were well rooted in the slate rock, and some fifty or sixty feet high--the one, some twenty yards below the other. The blast tore the highest out of the ground, peeling its roots from the rock as one peels an orange--swept the head of the lower tree away with it in one ruin, and snapped the two leader branches of the upper one over the other's stump, as one would break one's cane over some people's heads, if one got the chance. In wind action of this kind the amount of actual force used is the least part of the business;--it is the suddenness of its concentration, and the lifting and twisting strength, as of a wrestler, which make the blast fatal; none of which elements of storm-power can be recognized by mechanical tests. In my friend's next letter, however, he gives us some evidence of the _consistent_ strength of this same gale, and of the electric conditions which attended it:--the prefatory notice of his pet bird I had meant for 'Love's Meinie,' but it will help us through the grimness of our studies here. "_March 3d, 1884._ My small blackheaded gull Jack is still flourishing, and the time is coming when I look for that singularly sudden change in the plumage of his head which took place last March. I have asked all my ocean-going friends to note whether these little birds are not the gulls _par excellence_ of the sea; and so far all I have heard from them confirms this. It seems almost incredible; but my son, a sailor, who met that hurricane of the 26th of January, writes to me to say that out in the Bay of Biscay on the morning after the gale, 'though it was blowing like blazes, I observed some little gulls of Jacky's species, and they followed us half way across the Bay, seeming to find shelter under the lee of our ship. Some alighted now and then, and rested upon the water as if tired.' When one considers that these birds must have been at sea all that night somewhere, it gives one a great idea of their strength and endurance. My son's ship, though a powerful ocean steamer, was for two whole hours battling head to sea off the Eddystone that night, and for that time the lead gave no increase of soundings, so that she could have made no headway during those two hours; while all the time her yards had the St. Elmo's fire at their ends, looking as though a blue light was burning at each yard-arm, and this was about all they could see.
"BURNHAM, SOMERSET, _February 7th, 1884_. DEAR SIR,--I read with great interest your first lecture at Oxford on cloud and wind (very indifferently reported in 'The Times'). You have given a name to a wind I've known for years. You call it the plague--I call it the devil-wind: _e. g._, on April 29th, 1882, morning warmer, then rain storms from east; afternoon, rain squalls; wind, west by south, rough; barometer falling awfully; 4.30 p.m., tremendous wind.--April 30th, all the leaves of the trees, all plants black and dead, as if a fiery blast had swept over them. _All the hedges on windward side black as black tea._ Another devil-wind came towards the end of last summer. The next day, all the leaves were falling sere and yellow, as if it were late autumn.
"On the Yorkshire and Derbyshire hills, when the rain-cloud is low and much broken, and the steady west wind fills all space with its strength,[B] the sun-gleams fly like golden vultures; they are flashes rather than shinings; the dark spaces and the dazzling race and skim along the acclivities, and dart and _dip from crag to dell, swallow-like_." The dipping of the shadows here described of course is caused only by that of the dingles they cross; but I have not in any of my books yet dwelt enough on the difference of character between the dipping and the mounting winds. Our wildest phase of the west wind here at Coniston is 'swallow-like' with a vengeance, coming down on the lake in swirls which spurn the spray under them as a fiery horse does the dust. On the other hand, the softly ascending winds express themselves in the grace of their cloud motion, as if set to the continuous music of a distant song.[C] The reader will please note also that whenever, either in 'Modern Painters' or elsewhere, I speak of rate of flight in clouds, I am thinking of it as measured by the horizontal distance overpast in given time, and not as apparent only, owing to the nearness of the spectator. All low clouds appear to move faster than high ones, the pace being supposed equal in both: but when I speak of quick or slow cloud, it is always with respect to a given altitude. In a fine summer morning, a cloud will wait for you among the pines, folded to and fro among their stems, with a branch or two coming out here, and a spire or two there: you walk through it, and look back to it. At another time, on the same spot, the fury of cloud-flood drifts past you like the Rhine at Schaffhausen. The space even of the doubled lecture does not admit of my entering into any general statement of the action of the plague-cloud in Switzerland and Italy; but I must not omit the following notes of its aspect in the high Alps. "SALLENCHES, _11th September, 1882_. This morning, at half-past five, the Mont Blanc summit was clear, and the greater part of the Aiguilles du Plan and Midi clear dark--all, against pure cirri, lighted beneath by sunrise; the sun of course not visible yet from the valley. By seven o'clock, the plague-clouds had formed in _brown_ flakes, down to the base of the Aiguille de Bionassay; entirely covering the snowy ranges; the sun, as it rose to us here, shone only for about ten minutes--gilding in its old glory the range of the Dorons,--before one had time to look from peak to peak of it, the plague-cloud formed from the west, hid Mont Joli, and steadily choked the valley with advancing streaks of dun-colored mist. Now--twenty minutes to nine--there is not _one ray_ of sunshine on the whole valley, or on its mountains, from the Forclaz down to Cluse. These phenomena are only the sequel of a series of still more strange and sad conditions of the air, which have continued among the Savoy Alps for the last eight days, (themselves the sequel of others yet more general, prolonged, and harmful). But the weather was perfectly fine at Dijon, and I doubt not at Chamouni, on the 1st of this month. On the 2d, in the evening, I saw, from the Jura, heavy thunderclouds in the west; on the 3d, the weather broke at Morez, in hot thunder-showers, with intervals of scorching sun; on the 4th, 5th, and 6th there was nearly continuous rain at St. Cergues, the Alps being totally invisible all the time. The sky cleared on the night of the 6th, and on the 7th I saw from the top of the Dole all the western plateaux of Jura quite clearly; but _the entire range of the Alps_, from the Moleson to the Saleve, and all beyond,--snow, crag and hill-side,--were wrapped and buried in one unbroken gray-brown winding-sheet, of such cloud _as I had never seen till that day touch an Alpine summit_. The wind, from the east, (so that it blew _up_ over the edge of the Dole cliff, and admitted of perfect shelter on the slope to the west,) was bitter cold, and extremely violent: the sun overhead, bright enough, and remained so during the afternoon; the plague-cloud reaching from the Alps only about as far as the southern shore of the lake of Geneva; but we could not see the Saleve; nor even the north shore, farther than to Morges! I reached the Col de la Faucille at sunset, when, for a few minutes, the Mont Blanc and Aiguille Verte showed themselves in dull red light, but were buried again, before the sun was quite down, in the rising deluge of cloud-poison. I saw no farther than the Voirons and Brezon--and scarcely those, during the electric heat of the 9th at Geneva; and last Saturday and Sunday have been mere whirls and drifts of indecisive, but always sullen, storm. This morning I saw the snows clear for the first time, having been, during the whole past week, on steady watch for them. I have written that the clouds of the 7th were such as I never before saw on the Alps. Often, during the past ten years, I have seen them on my own hills, and in Italy in 1874; but it has always chanced to be fine weather, or common rain and cold, when I have been among the snowy chains; and now from the Dole for the first time I saw the plague-cloud on _them_." [Footnote A: 'THE LOOK OF THE SKY. '_To the_ EDITOR _of the_ ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE. 'SIR,--I have been a very constant though not a scientific observer of the sky for a period of forty years; and I confess to a certain feeling of astonishment at the way in which the "recent celestial phenomena" seem to have taken the whole body of scientific observers by surprise. It would even appear that something like these extraordinary sunsets was necessary to call the attention of such observers to what has long been a source of perplexity to a variety of common folk, like sailors, farmers, and fishermen. But to such people the look of the weather, and what comes of that look, is of far more consequence than the exact amount of ozone or the depth or width of a band of the spectrum. 'Now, to all such observers, including myself, it has been plain that of late neither the look of the sky nor the character of the weather has been, as we should say, what it used to be; and those whose eyes were strong enough to look now and then toward the sun have noticed a very marked increase of what some would call a watery look about him, which might perhaps be better expressed as a white sheen or glare, at times developing into solar halo or mock suns, as noted in your paper of the 2d of October last year. A fisherman would describe it as "white and davery-like." So far as my observation goes, this appearance was only absent here for a limited period during the present summer, when we had a week or two of nearly normal weather; the summer before it was seldom absent. 'Again, those whose business or pleasure has depended on the use of wind-power have all remarked the strange persistence of hard westerly and easterly winds, the westerly ones at times partaking of an almost trade-wind-like force and character. The summer of 1882 was especially remarkable for these winds, while each stormy November has been followed by a period about mid-winter of mild calm weather with dense fog. During these strong winds in summer and early autumn the weather would remain bright and sunny, and to a landsman would be not remarkable in any way, while the barometer has been little affected by them; but it has been often observed by those employed on the water that when it ceased blowing half a gale the sky at once became overcast, with damp weather or rain. This may all seem common enough to most people; but to those accustomed to gauge the wind by the number of reefs wanted in a mainsail or foresail it was not so; and the number of consecutive days when two or more reefs have been kept tied down during the last few summers has been remarkable--alternating at times with equally persistent spells of calm and fog such as we are now passing through. Again, we have had an unusually early appearance of ice in the Atlantic, and most abnormal weather over Central Europe; while in a letter I have just received from an old hand on board a large Australian clipper, he speaks of heavy gales and big seas off that coast in almost the height of their summer. 'Now, upon all this, in our season of long twilights, we have bursting upon us some clear weather; with a display of cloud-forms or vapor at such an elevation that, looking at them one day through an opening in the nearer clouds, they seemed so distant as to resemble nothing but the delicate grain of ivory upon a billiard-ball. And yet with the fact that two-thirds of this earth is covered with water, and bearing in mind the effect which a very small increase of sun-power would have in producing cloud and lifting it above its normal level for a time, we are asked to believe that this sheen is all dust of some kind or other, in order to explain what are now known as the "recent sunsets": though I venture to think that we shall see more of them yet when the sun comes our way again. 'At first sight, increased sun-power would seem to mean more sunshine; but a little reflection would show us that this would not be for long, while any considerable addition to the sun's power would be followed by such a vast increase of vapor that we should only see him, in our latitudes, at very short intervals. I am aware that all this is most unscientific; but I have read column after column of explanation written by those who are supposed to know all about such things, and find myself not a jot the wiser for it. Do you know anybody who is?--I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
"Oh beauteous birds, methinks ye measure And again-- "While the mists, And again-- "The Knight had ridden down from Wensley moor,
Going out of the mouth, that is to say, deliberately and of purpose. A French postilion's 'Sacr-r-re'--loud, with the low 'Nom de Dieu' following between his teeth, is not blasphemy, unless against his horse;--but Mr. Thackeray's close of his Waterloo chapter in 'Vanity Fair,' "And all the night long Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face dead with a bullet through his heart," is blasphemy of the most fatal and subtle kind. And the universal instinct of blasphemy in the modern vulgar scientific mind is above all manifested in its love of what is ugly, and natural inthrallment by the abominable;--so that it is ten to one if, in the description of a new bird, you learn much more of it than the enumerated species of vermin that stick to its feathers; and in the natural history museum of Oxford, humanity has been hitherto taught, not by portraits of great men, but by the skulls of cretins. But the _deliberate_ blasphemy of science, the assertion of its own virtue and dignity against the always implied, and often asserted, vileness of all men and--Gods,--heretofore, is the most wonderful phenomenon, so far as I can read or perceive, that hitherto has arisen in the always marvelous course of the world's mental history. Take, for brief general type, the following 92d paragraph of the 'Forms of Water':-- "But while we thus acknowledge our limits, there is also reason for wonder at the extent to which Science has mastered the system of nature. From age to age and from generation to generation, fact has been added to fact and law to law, the true method and order of the Universe being thereby more and more revealed. In doing this, Science has encountered and overthrown various forms of superstition and deceit, of credulity and imposture. But the world continually produces weak persons and wicked persons, and as long as they continue to exist side by side, as they do in this our day, very debasing beliefs will also continue to infest the world." The debasing beliefs meant being simply those of Homer, David, and St. John[A]--as against a modern French gamin's. And what the results of the intended education of English gamins of every degree in that new higher theology will be, England is I suppose by this time beginning to discern. In the last 'Fors'[B] which I have written, on education of a safer kind, still possible, one practical point is insisted on chiefly,--that learning by heart, and repetition with perfect accent and cultivated voice, should be made quite principal branches of school discipline up to the time of going to the university. And of writings to be learned by heart, among other passages of indisputable philosophy and perfect poetry, I include certain chapters of the--now for the most part forgotten--wisdom of Solomon; and of these, there is one selected portion which I should recommend not only school-boys and girls, but persons of every age, if they don't know it, to learn forthwith, as the shortest summary of Solomon's wisdom;--namely, the seventeenth chapter of Proverbs, which being only twenty-eight verses long, may be fastened in the dullest memory at the rate of a verse a day in the shortest month of the year. Out of the twenty-eight verses, I will read you seven, for example of their tenor,--the last of the seven I will with your good leave dwell somewhat upon. You have heard the verses often before, but probably without remembering that they are all in this concentrated chapter. 1. Verse 1.--Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than a house full of good eating, with strife. (Remember, in reading this verse, that though England has chosen the strife, and set every man's hand against his neighbor, her house is not yet so full of good eating as she expected, even though she gets half of her victuals from America.) 2. Verse 3.--The fining pot is for silver, the furnace for gold, but the Lord tries the heart. (Notice the increasing strength of trial for the more precious thing: only the melting-pot for the silver--the fierce furnace for the gold--but the Fire of the Lord for the heart.) 3. Verse 4.--A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips. (That means, for _you_, that, intending to live by usury and swindling, you read Mr. Adam Smith and Mr. Stuart Mill, and other such political economists.) 4. Verse 5.--Whoso mocketh the poor, reproacheth his Maker. (Mocketh,--by saying that his poverty is his fault, no less than his misfortune,--England's favorite theory now-a-days.) 5. Verse 12.--Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly. (Carlyle is often now accused of false scorn in his calling the passengers over London Bridge, "mostly fools,"--on the ground that men are only to be justly held foolish if their intellect is under, as only wise when it is above, the average. But the reader will please observe that the essential function of modern education is to develop what capacity of mistake a man has. Leave him at his forge and plow,--and those tutors teach him his true value, indulge him in no error, and provoke him to no vice. But take him up to London,--give him her papers to read, and her talk to hear,--and it is fifty to one you send him presently on a fool's errand over London Bridge.) 6. Now listen, for this verse is the question you have mainly to ask yourselves about your beautiful all-over-England system of competitive examination:-- Verse 16. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing he hath no heart to it? (You know perfectly well it isn't the wisdom you want, but the "station in life,"--and the money!) 7. Lastly, Verse 7.--Wisdom is before him that hath understanding, but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth. "And in the beginnings of it"! Solomon would have written, had he lived in our day; but we will be content with the ends at present. No scientific people, as I told you at first, have taken any notice of the more or less temporary phenomena of which I have to-night given you register. But, from the constant arrangements of the universe, the same respecting which the thinkers of former time came to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to end in good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite and extremely uncomfortable conclusion that they are essentially evil, and to end--in nothing. And I have here a volume,[C] before quoted, by a very foolish and very lugubrious author, who in his concluding chapter gives us,--founded, you will observe, on a series of 'ifs,'--the latest scientific views concerning the order of creation. "We have spoken already about a medium pervading space"--this is the Scientific God, you observe, differing from the unscientific one, in that the purest in heart cannot see--nor the softest in heart feel--this spacious Deity--a _Medium_, pervading space--"the office of which" (italics all mine) "appears to be to _degrade_ and ultimately _extinguish_, all differential motion. It has been well pointed out by Thomson, that, looked at _in this light_, the universe is a system that had a beginning and must have an end, for a process of degradation cannot be eternal. If we could view the Universe as a candle not lit, then it is perhaps conceivable to regard it as having been always in existence; but if we regard it rather as a candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will come when it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning in which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert mass, _and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty, will have utterly gone away_." Do you wish me to congratulate you on this extremely cheerful result of telescopic and microscopic observation, and so at once close my lecture? or may I venture yet to trespass on your time by stating to you any of the more comfortable views held by persons who did not regard the universe in what my author humorously calls "this _light_"? In the peculiarly characteristic notice with which the 'Daily News' honored my last week's lecture, that courteous journal charged me, in the metaphorical term now classical on Exchange, with "hedging," to conceal my own opinions. The charge was not prudently chosen, since, of all men now obtaining any portion of popular regard, I am pretty well known to be precisely the one who cares least either for hedge or ditch, when he chooses to go across country. It is certainly true that I have not the least mind to pin my heart on my sleeve, for the daily daw, or nightly owl, to peck at; but the essential reason for my not telling you my own opinions on this matter is--that I do not consider them of material consequence to you. It _might_ possibly be of some advantage for you to know what--were he now living, Orpheus would have thought, or AEschylus, or a Daniel come to judgment, or John the Baptist, or John the Son of Thunder; but what either you, or I, or any other Jack or Tom of us all, think,--even if we knew what to think,--is of extremely small moment either to the Gods, the clouds, or ourselves. Of myself, however, if you care to hear it, I will tell you thus much: that had the weather when I was young been such as it is now, no book such as 'Modern Painters' ever would or _could_ have been written; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, was founded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of nature, all spring and summer long; and on the then demonstrable fact that over a great portion of the world's surface the air and the earth were fitted to the education of the spirit of man as closely as a school-boy's primer is to his labor, and as gloriously as a lover's mistress is to his eyes. That harmony is now broken, and broken the world round: fragments, indeed, of what existed still exist, and hours of what is past still return; but month by month the darkness gains upon the day, and the ashes of the Antipodes glare through the night.[D] What consolation, or what courage, through plague, danger, or darkness, you can find in the conviction that you are nothing more than brute beasts driven by brute forces, your other tutors can tell you--not I: but _this_ I can tell you--and with the authority of all the masters of thought since time was time,--that, while by no manner of vivisection you can learn what a _Beast_ is, by only looking into your own hearts you may know what a _Man_ is,--and know that his only true happiness is to live in Hope of something to be won by him, in Reverence of something to be worshiped by him, and in Love of something to be cherished by him, and cherished--forever. Having these instincts, his only rational conclusion is that the objects which can fulfill them may be by his effort gained, and by his faith discerned; and his only earthly wisdom is to accept the united testimony of the men who have sought these things in the way they were commanded. Of whom no single one has ever said that his obedience or his faith had been vain, or found himself cast out from the choir of the living souls, whether here, or departed, for whom the song was written:-- Oh let the nations rejoice and sing for joy, for Thou shalt judge
[Footnote B: Hence to the end the text is that read in termination of the lecture on its second delivery, only with an added word or two of comment on Proverbs xvii.] [Footnote C: 'The Conservation of Energy.' King and Co., 1873.] [Footnote D: Written under the impression that the lurid and prolonged sunsets of last autumn had been proved to be connected with the flight of volcanic ashes. This has been since, I hear, disproved again. Whatever their cause, those sunsets were, in the sense in which I myself use the word, altogether 'unnatural' and terrific: but they have no connection with the far more fearful, because protracted and increasing, power of the Plague-wind. The letter from White's 'History of Selborne,' quoted by the Rev. W. R. Andrews in his letter to the 'Times,' (dated January 8th) seems to describe aspects of the sky like these of 1883, just a hundred years before, in 1783: and also some of the circumstances noted, especially the variation of the wind to all quarters without alteration in the air, correspond with the character of the plague-wind; but the fog of 1783 made the sun dark, with iron-colored rays--not pale, with blanching rays. I subjoin Mr. Andrews' letter, extremely valuable in its collation of the records of simultaneous volcanic phenomena; praying the reader also to observe the instantaneous acknowledgment, by the true 'Naturalist,' of horror in the violation of beneficent natural law. "THE RECENT SUNSETS AND VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS. "SIR,--It may, perhaps, be interesting at the present time, when so much attention has been given to the late brilliant sunsets and sunrises, to be reminded that almost identically the same appearances were observed just a hundred years ago. Gilbert White writes in the year 1783, in his 109th letter, published in his 'Natural History of Selborne':-- 'The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze or smoky fog that prevailed for many weeks in this island and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23d to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun at noon looked as black as a clouded moon, and shed a ferruginous light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid and blood-colored at rising and setting. The country people began to look with a superstitious awe at the red lowering aspect of the sun; and, indeed, there was reason for the most enlightened person to be apprehensive, for all the while Calabria and part of the Isle of Sicily were torn and convulsed with earthquakes, and about that juncture a volcano sprang out of the sea on the coast of Norway.' Other writers also mention volcanic disturbances in this same year, 1783. We are told by Lyell and Geikie, that there were great volcanic eruptions in and near Iceland. A submarine volcano burst forth in the sea, thirty miles southwest of Iceland, which ejected so much pumice that the ocean was covered with this substance, to the distance of 150 miles, and ships were considerably impeded in their course; and a new island was formed, from which fire and smoke and pumice were emitted. Besides this submarine eruption, the volcano Skaptar-Joekull, on the mainland, on June 11th, 1783, threw out a torrent of lava, so immense as to surpass in magnitude the bulk of Mont Blanc, and ejected so vast an amount of fine dust, that the atmosphere over Iceland continued loaded with it for months afterwards. It fell in such quantities over parts of Caithness--a distance of 600 miles--as to destroy the crops, and that year is still spoken of by the inhabitants as the year of 'the ashie.' These particulars are gathered from the text-books of Lyell and Geikie. I am not aware whether the coincidence in time of the Icelandic eruptions, and of the peculiar appearance of the sun, described by Gilbert White, has yet been noticed; but this coincidence may very well be taken as some little evidence towards explaining the connection between the recent beautiful sunsets and the tremendous volcanic explosion of the Isle of Krakatoa in August last.
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