THE COMPLETE WORKS

 OF

 JOHN RUSKIN

 VOLUME XXIV

 OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US

 STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

 HORTUS INCLUSUS

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 THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

 TWO LECTURES

 DELIVERED AT THE LONDON INSTITUTION

 FEBRUARY 4TH AND 11TH, 1884. 

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CONTENTS. 

 PAGE

PREFACE iii

LECTURE I. (FEBRUARY 4) 1

LECTURE II. (FEBRUARY 11) 31

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PREFACE. 

The following lectures, drawn up under the pressure of moreimperative and quite otherwise directed work, contain many passageswhich stand in need of support, and some, I do not doubt, more orless of correction, which I always prefer to receive openly fromthe better knowledge of friends, after setting down my ownimpressions of the matter in clearness as far as they reach, thanto guard myself against by submitting my manuscript, beforepublication, to annotators whose stricture or suggestion I mightoften feel pain in refusing, yet hesitation in admitting. 

But though thus hastily, and to some extent incautiously, throwninto form, the statements in the text are founded on patient and, in all essential particulars, accurately recorded observations ofthe sky, during fifty years of a life of solitude and leisure; andin all they contain of what may seem to the reader questionable, orastonishing, are guardedly and absolutely true. 

In many of the reports given by the daily press, my assertion ofradical change, during recent years, in weather aspect was scoutedas imaginary, or insane. I am indeed, every day of my yet sparedlife, more and more grateful that my mind is capable of imaginativevision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separatethe speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinctof brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use orrefuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy commandof it as a physicist's of his telescope: the times of morbid arejust as easily distinguished by me from those of healthy vision, asby men of ordinary faculty, dream from waking; nor is there asingle fact stated in the following pages which I have notverified with a chemist's analysis, and a geometer's precision. 

The first lecture is printed, with only addition here and there ofan elucidatory word or phrase, precisely as it was given on the 4thFebruary. In repeating it on the 11th, I amplified severalpassages, and substituted for the concluding one, which had beenprinted with accuracy in most of the leading journals, someobservations which I thought calculated to be of more generalinterest. To these, with the additions in the first text, I havenow prefixed a few explanatory notes, to which numeral referencesare given in the pages they explain, and have arranged thefragments in connection clear enough to allow of their being readwith ease as a second Lecture. 

 HERNE HILL, _12th March, 1884_. 

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THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

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THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

Let me first assure my audience that I have no _arrière pensée_ inthe title chosen for this lecture. I might, indeed, have meant, andit would have been only too like me to mean, any number of thingsby such a title;--but, to-night, I mean simply what I have said, and propose to bring to your notice a series of cloud phenomena, which, so far as I can weigh existing evidence, are peculiar to ourown times; yet which have not hitherto received any special noticeor description from meteorologists. 

So far as the existing evidence, I say, of former literature can beinterpreted, the storm-cloud--or more accurately plague-cloud, forit is not always stormy--which I am about to describe to you, neverwas seen but by now living, or _lately_ living eyes. It is not yettwenty years that this--I may well call it, wonderful, cloud hasbeen, in its essence, recognizable. There is no description of it, so far as I have read, by any ancient observer. Neither Homer norVirgil, neither Aristophanes nor Horace, acknowledge any suchclouds among those compelled by Jove. Chaucer has no word of them, nor Dante;[1] Milton none, nor Thomson. In modern times, Scott, Wordsworth and Byron are alike unconscious of them; and the mostobservant and descriptive of scientific men, De Saussure, isutterly silent concerning them. Taking up the traditions of airfrom the year before Scott's death, I am able, by my own constantand close observation, to certify you that in the forty followingyears (1831 to 1871 approximately--for the phenomena in questioncame on gradually)--no such clouds as these are, and are now oftenfor months without intermission, were ever seen in the skies ofEngland, France, or Italy. 

In those old days, when weather was fine, it was luxuriously fine;when it was bad--it was often abominably bad, but it had its fit oftemper and was done with it--it didn't sulk for three monthswithout letting you see the sun, --nor send you one cyclone insideout, every Saturday afternoon, and another outside in, every Mondaymorning. 

In fine weather the sky was either blue or clear in its light; theclouds, either white or golden, adding to, not abating, the lusterof the sky. In wet weather, there were two different species ofclouds, --those of beneficent rain, which for distinction's sake Iwill call the non-electric rain-cloud, and those of storm, usuallycharged highly with electricity. The beneficent rain-cloud wasindeed often extremely dull and gray for days together, butgracious nevertheless, felt to be doing good, and often to bedelightful after drought; capable also of the most exquisitecoloring, under certain conditions;[2] and continually traversed inclearing by the rainbow:--and, secondly, the storm-cloud, alwaysmajestic, often dazzlingly beautiful, and felt also to bebeneficent in its own way, affecting the mass of the air with vitalagitation, and purging it from the impurity of all morbificelements. 

In the entire system of the Firmament, thus seen and understood, there appeared to be, to all the thinkers of those ages, theincontrovertible and unmistakable evidence of a Divine Power increation, which had fitted, as the air for human breath, so theclouds for human sight and nourishment;--the Father who was inheaven feeding day by day the souls of His children with marvels, and satisfying them with bread, and so filling their hearts withfood and gladness. 

Their _hearts_, you will observe, it is said, not merely theirbellies, --or indeed not at all, in this sense, their bellies--butthe heart itself, with its blood for this life, and its faith forthe next. The opposition between this idea and the notions of ourown time may be more accurately expressed by modification of theGreek than of the English sentence. The old Greek is--

 [Greek: empiplôn trophês kai euphrosynês tas kardias hêmôn. ]

filling with meat, and cheerfulness, our hearts. The modern Greekshould be--

 [Greek: empiplôn anemou kai aphrosynês tas gasteras hêmôn. ]

filling with wind, and foolishness, our stomachs. 

You will not think I waste your time in giving you two cardinalexamples of the sort of evidence which the higher forms ofliterature furnish respecting the cloud-phenomena of former times. 

When, in the close of my lecture on landscape last year at Oxford, I spoke of stationary clouds as distinguished from passing ones, some blockheads wrote to the papers to say that clouds never werestationary. Those foolish letters were so far useful in causing afriend to write me the pretty one I am about to read to you, quoting a passage about clouds in Homer which I had myself nevernoticed, though perhaps the most beautiful of its kind in theIliad. In the fifth book, after the truce is broken, and theaggressor Trojans are rushing to the onset in a tumult of clamorand charge, Homer says that the Greeks, abiding them "stood likeclouds. " My correspondent, giving the passage, writes as follows:--

"SIR, --Last winter when I was at Ajaccio, I was one day readingHomer by the open window, and came upon the lines--

 [Greek: All' emenon, nephelêsin eoikotes has te Kroniôn Nênemiês estêsen ep' akropoloisin oressin, Atremas, ophr' heudêsi menos Boreao kai allôn Zachreiôn anemôn, hoite nephea skioenta Pnoiêsin lygyrêsi diaskidnasin aentes; Hôs Danaoi Trôas menon empedon, oud' ephebonto. ]

'But they stood, like the clouds which the Son of Kronos stablishesin calm upon the mountains, motionless, when the rage of the Northand of all the fiery winds is asleep. ' As I finished these lines, Iraised my eyes, and looking across the gulf, saw a long line ofclouds resting on the top of its hills. The day was windless, andthere they stayed, hour after hour, without any stir or motion. Iremember how I was delighted at the time, and have often since thatday thought on the beauty and the truthfulness of Homer's simile. 

"Perhaps this little fact may interest you, at a time when you areattacked for your description of clouds. 

 "I am, sir, yours faithfully, G. B. HILL. "

With this bit of noonday from Homer, I will read you a sunset and asunrise from Byron. That will enough express to you the scope andsweep of all glorious literature, from the orient of Greece herselfto the death of the last Englishman who loved her. [3] I will readyou from 'Sardanapalus' the address of the Chaldean priest Belesesto the sunset, and of the Greek slave, Myrrha, to the morning. 

 "The sun goes down: methinks he sets more slowly, Taking his last look of Assyria's empire. How red he glares amongst those deepening clouds, [4] Like the blood he predicts. [5] If not in vain, Thou sun that sinkest, and ye stars which rise, I have outwatch'd ye, reading ray by ray The edicts of your orbs, which make Time tremble For what he brings the nations, 't is the furthest Hour of Assyria's years. And yet how calm! An earthquake should announce so great a fall-- A summer's sun discloses it. Yon disk To the star-read Chaldean, bears upon Its everlasting page the end of what Seem'd everlasting; but oh! thou TRUE sun! _The burning oracle of all that live_, _As fountain of all life_, and _symbol of Him who bestows it_, wherefore dost thou limit Thy lore unto calamity?[6] Why not Unfold the rise of days more worthy thine All-glorious burst from ocean? why not dart A beam of hope athwart the future years, As of wrath to its days? Hear me! oh, hear me! I am thy worshiper, thy priest, thy servant-- I have gazed on thee at thy rise and fall, And bow'd my head beneath thy mid-day beams, When my eye dared not meet thee. I have watch'd For thee, and after thee, and pray'd to thee, And sacrificed to thee, and read, and fear'd thee, And ask'd of thee, and thou hast answer'd--but Only to thus much. While I speak, he sinks-- Is gone--and leaves his beauty, not his knowledge, To the delighted west, which revels in Its hues of dying glory. Yet what is Death, so it be but glorious? 'T is a sunset; And mortals may be happy to resemble The gods but in decay. "

Thus the Chaldean priest, to the brightness of the setting sun. Hear now the Greek girl, Myrrha, of his rising. 

 "The day at last has broken. What a night Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven! Though varied with a transitory storm, More beautiful in that variety:[7] How hideous upon earth! where peace, and hope, And love, and revel, in an hour were trampled By human passions to a human chaos, Not yet resolved to separate elements:-- 'T is warring still! And can the sun so rise, So bright, so rolling back the clouds into _Vapors more lovely than the unclouded sky_, With golden pinnacles, and snowy mountains, And billows purpler than the ocean's, making In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth, So like, --we almost deem it permanent; So fleeting, --we can scarcely call it aught Beyond a vision, 't is so transiently Scatter'd along the eternal vault: and yet It dwells upon the soul, and soothes the soul, And blends itself into the soul, until Sunrise and sunset form the haunted epoch Of sorrow and of love. "

How often _now_--young maids of London, --do you make _sunrise_ the'haunted epoch' of either?

Thus much, then, of the skies that used to be, and clouds "morelovely than the unclouded sky, " and of the temper of theirobservers. I pass to the account of clouds that _are_, and--I sayit with sorrow--of the _dis_temper of _their_ observers. 

But the general division which I have instituted betweenbad-weather and fair-weather clouds must be more carefully carriedout in the sub-species, before we can reason of it farther: andbefore we begin talk either of the sub-genera and sub-species, orsuper-genera and super-species of cloud, perhaps we had betterdefine what _every_ cloud is, and must be, to begin with. 

Every cloud that can be, is thus primarily definable: "Visiblevapor of water floating at a certain height in the air. " The secondclause of this definition, you see, at once implies that there issuch a thing as visible vapor of water which does _not_ float at acertain height in the air. You are all familiar with one extremelycognizable variety of that sort of vapor--London Particular; butthat especial blessing of metropolitan society is only astrongly-developed and highly-seasoned condition of a form ofwatery vapor which exists just as generally and widely at thebottom of the air, as the clouds do--on what, for convenience'sake, we may call the top of it;--only as yet, thanks to thesagacity of scientific men, we have got no general name for thebottom cloud, though the whole question of cloud nature begins inthis broad fact, that you have one kind of vapor that lies to acertain depth on the ground, and another that floats at a certainheight in the sky. Perfectly definite, in both cases, the surfacelevel of the earthly vapor, and the roof level of the heavenlyvapor, are each of them drawn within the depth of a fathom. Under_their_ line, drawn for the day and for the hour, the clouds willnot stoop, and above _theirs, _ the mists will not rise. Each intheir own region, high or deep, may expatiate at their pleasure;within that, they climb, or decline, --within that they congeal ormelt away; but below their assigned horizon the surges of the cloudsea may not sink, and the floods of the mist lagoon may not beswollen. 

That is the first idea you have to get well into your mindsconcerning the abodes of this visible vapor; next, you have toconsider the manner of its visibility. Is it, you have to ask, withcloud vapor, as with most other things, that they are seen whenthey are there, and not seen when they are not there? or has cloudvapor so much of the ghost in it, that it can be visible orinvisible as it likes, and may perhaps be all unpleasantly andmalignantly there, just as much when we don't see it, as when wedo? To which I answer, comfortably and generally, that, on thewhole, a cloud is where you see it, and isn't where you don't;that, when there's an evident and honest thundercloud in thenortheast, you needn't suppose there's a surreptitious and slinkingone in the northwest;--when there's a visible fog at Bermondsey, itdoesn't follow there's a spiritual one, more than usual, at theWest End: and when you get up to the clouds, and can walk into themor out of them, as you like, you find when you're in them they wetyour whiskers, or take out your curls, and when you're out of them, they don't; and therefore you may with probability assume--not withcertainty, observe, but with probability--that there's more waterin the air where it damps your curls than where it doesn't. If itgets much denser than that, it will begin to rain; and then youmay assert, certainly with safety, that there is a shower in oneplace, and not in another; and not allow the scientific people totell you that the rain is everywhere, but palpable in TooleyStreet, and impalpable in Grosvenor Square. 

That, I say, is broadly and comfortably so on the whole, --and yetwith this kind of qualification and farther condition in thematter. If you watch the steam coming strongly out of anengine-funnel, [8]--at the top of the funnel it is transparent, --youcan't see it, though it is more densely and intensely therethan anywhere else. Six inches out of the funnel it becomessnow-white, --you see it, and you see it, observe, exactly where itis, --it is then a real and proper cloud. Twenty yards off thefunnel it scatters and melts away; a little of it sprinkles youwith rain if you are underneath it, but the rest disappears; yet itis still there;--the surrounding air does not absorb it all intospace in a moment; there is a gradually diffusing current ofinvisible moisture at the end of the visible stream--an invisible, yet quite substantial, vapor; but not, according to our definition, a cloud, for a cloud is vapor _visible_. 

Then the next bit of the question, of course, is, What makes thevapor visible, when it is so? Why is the compressed steamtransparent, the loose steam white, the dissolved steam transparentagain?

The scientific people tell you that the vapor becomes visible, andchilled, as it expands. Many thanks to them; but can they show usany reason why particles of water should be more opaque when theyare separated than when they are close together, or give us anyidea of the difference of the state of a particle of water, whichwon't _sink_ in the air, from that of one that won't _rise_ init?[9]

And here I must parenthetically give you a little word of, I willventure to say, extremely useful, advice about scientific people ingeneral. Their first business is, of course, to tell you thingsthat are so, and do happen, --as that, if you warm water, it willboil; if you cool it, it will freeze; and if you put a candle to acask of gunpowder, it will blow you up. Their second, and far moreimportant business, is to tell you what you had best do under thecircumstances, --put the kettle on in time for tea; powder your iceand salt, if you have a mind for ices; and obviate the chance ofexplosion by not making the gunpowder. But if, beyond this safe andbeneficial business, they ever try to _explain_ anything to you, you may be confident of one of two things, --either that they knownothing (to speak of) about it, or that they have only seen oneside of it--and not only haven't seen, but usually have no mind tosee, the other. When, for instance, Professor Tyndall explains thetwisted beds of the Jungfrau to you by intimating that theMatterhorn is growing flat;[10] or the clouds on the lee side ofthe Matterhorn by the wind's rubbing against the windward side ofit, [11]--you may be pretty sure the scientific people don't knowmuch (to speak of) yet, either about rock-beds, or cloud-beds. Andeven if the explanation, so to call it, be sound on one side, windward or lee, you may, as I said, be nearly certain it won't doon the other. Take the very top and center of scientificinterpretation by the greatest of its masters: Newton explained toyou--or at least was once supposed to have explained--why an applefell; but he never thought of explaining the exactly correlative, but infinitely more difficult question, how the apple got up there!

You will not, therefore, so please you, expect me to explainanything to you, --I have come solely and simply to put before you afew facts, which you can't see by candlelight, or in railroadtunnels, but which are making themselves now so very distinctlyfelt as well as seen, that you may perhaps have to roof, if notwall, half London afresh before we are many years older. 

I go back to my point--the way in which clouds, as a matter offact, become visible. I have defined the floating or sky cloud, anddefined the falling, or earth cloud. But there's a sort of thingbetween the two, which needs a third definition: namely, Mist. Inthe 22d page of his 'Glaciers of the Alps, ' Professor Tyndall saysthat "the marvelous blueness of the sky in the earlier part of theday indicated that the air was charged, almost to saturation, withtransparent aqueous vapor. " Well, in certain weather that is true. You all know the peculiar clearness which precedes rain, --when thedistant hills are looking nigh. I take it on trust from thescientific people that there is then a quantity--almost tosaturation--of aqueous vapor in the air, but it is aqueous vapor ina state which makes the air more transparent than it would bewithout it. What state of aqueous molecule is that, absolutelyunreflective[12] of light--perfectly transmissive of light, andshowing at once the color of blue water and blue air on the distanthills?

I put the question--and pass round to the other side. Such aclearness, though a certain forerunner of rain, is not always itsforerunner. Far the contrary. Thick air is a much more frequentforerunner of rain than clear air. In cool weather, you will oftenget the transparent prophecy: but in hot weather, or in certain nothitherto defined states of atmosphere, the forerunner of rain ismist. In a general way, after you have had two or three days ofrain, the air and sky are healthily clear, and the sun bright. Ifit is hot also, the next day is a little mistier--the next mistyand sultry, --and the next and the next, getting thicker andthicker--end in another storm, or period of rain. 

I suppose the thick air, as well as the transparent, is in bothcases saturated with aqueous vapor;--but also in both, observe, vapor that floats everywhere, as if you mixed mud with the sea; andit takes no shape anywhere: you may have it with calm, or withwind, it makes no difference to it. You have a nasty haze with abitter east wind, or a nasty haze with not a leaf stirring, and youmay have the clear blue vapor with a fresh rainy breeze, or theclear blue vapor as still as the sky above. What difference isthere between _these_ aqueous molecules that are clear, and thosethat are muddy, _these_ that must sink or rise, and those that muststay where they are, _these_ that have form and stature, that arebellied like whales and backed like weasels, and those that haveneither backs nor fronts, nor feet nor faces, but are a mist--andno more--over two or three thousand square miles?

I again leave the questions with you, and pass on. 

Hitherto I have spoken of all aqueous vapor as if it were eithertransparent or white--visible by becoming opaque like snow, but notby any accession of color. But even those of us who are leastobservant of skies, know that, irrespective of all superveningcolors from the sun, there are white clouds, brown clouds, grayclouds, and black clouds. Are these indeed--what they appear tobe--entirely distinct monastic disciplines of cloud: Black Friars, and White Friars, and Friars of Orders Gray? Or is it only theirvarious nearness to us, their denseness, and the failing of thelight upon them, that makes some clouds look black[13] and otherssnowy?

I can only give you qualified and cautious answer. There are, bydifferences in their own character, Dominican clouds, and there areFranciscan;--there are the Black Hussars of the Bandiera dellaMorte, and there are the Scots Grays whose horses can run upon therock. But if you ask me, as I would have you ask me, why argent andwhy sable, how baptized in white like a bride or a novice, and howhooded with blackness like a Judge of the Vehmgericht Tribunal, --Ileave these questions with you, and pass on. 

Admitting degrees of darkness, we have next to ask what color, fromsunshine can the white cloud receive, and what the black?

You won't expect me to tell you all that, or even the little thatis accurately known about that, in a quarter of an hour; yet notethese main facts on the matter. 

On any pure white, and practically opaque, cloud, or thing like acloud, as an Alp, or Milan Cathedral, you can have cast by risingor setting sunlight, any tints of amber, orange, or moderately deeprose--you can't have lemon yellows, or any kind of green except innegative hue by opposition; and though by stormlight you maysometimes get the reds cast very deep, beyond a certain limit youcannot go, --the Alps are never vermilion color, nor flamingocolor, nor canary color; nor did you ever see a full scarletcumulus of thundercloud. 

On opaque white vapor, then, remember, you can get a glow or ablush of color, never a flame of it. 

But when the cloud is transparent as well as pure, and can befilled with light through all the body of it, you then can have bythe light reflected[14] from its atoms any force conceivable byhuman mind of the entire group of the golden and ruby colors, fromintensely burnished gold color, through a scarlet for whosebrightness there are no words, into any depth and any hue of Tyriancrimson and Byzantine purple. These with full blue breathed betweenthem at the zenith, and green blue nearer the horizon, form thescales and chords of color possible to the morning and evening skyin pure and fine weather; the keynote of the opposition beingvermilion against green blue, both of equal tone, and at such aheight and acme of brilliancy that you cannot see the line wheretheir edges pass into each other. 

No colors that can be fixed in earth can ever represent to you theluster of these cloudy ones. But the actual tints may be shown youin a lower key, and to a certain extent their power and relation toeach other. 

I have painted the diagram here shown you with colors prepared forme lately by Messrs. Newman, which I find brilliant to the heightthat pigments can be; and the ready kindness of Mr. Wilson Barrettenables me to show you their effect by a white light as pure asthat of the day. The diagram is enlarged from my careful sketch ofthe sunset of 1st October, 1868, at Abbeville, which was abeautiful example of what, in fine weather about to pass intostorm, a sunset could then be, in the districts of Kent and Picardyunaffected by smoke. In reality, the ruby and vermilion cloudswere, by myriads, more numerous than I have had time to paint: butthe general character of their grouping is well enough expressed. All the illumined clouds are high in the air, and nearlymotionless; beneath them, electric storm-cloud rises in athreatening cumulus on the right, and drifts in dark flakes acrossthe horizon, casting from its broken masses radiating shadows onthe upper clouds. These shadows are traced, in the first place bymaking the misty blue of the open sky more transparent, andtherefore darker; and secondly, by entirely intercepting thesunbeams on the bars of cloud, which, within the shadowed spaces, show dark on the blue instead of light. 

But, mind, all that is done by reflected light--and in that lightyou never get a _green_ ray from the reflecting cloud; there is nosuch thing in nature as a green lighted cloud relieved from a redsky, --the cloud is always red, and the sky green, and green, observe, by transmitted, not reflected light. 

But now note, there is another kind of cloud, pure white, andexquisitely delicate; which acts not by reflecting, nor byrefracting, but, as it is now called, _dif_fracting, the sun'srays. The particles of this cloud are said--with what truth I knownot[15]--to send the sunbeams round them instead of through them;somehow or other, at any rate, they resolve them into theirprismatic elements; and then you have literally a kaleidoscope inthe sky, with every color of the prism in absolute purity; butabove all in force, now, the ruby red and the _green_, --withpurple, and violet-blue, in a virtual equality, more definite thanthat of the rainbow. The red in the rainbow is mostly brick red, the violet, though beautiful, often lost at the edge; but in theprismatic cloud the violet, the green, and the ruby are all morelovely than in any precious stones, and they are varied as in abird's breast, changing their places, depths, and extent at everyinstant. 

The main cause of this change being, that the prismatic clouditself is always in rapid, and generally in fluctuating motion. "Alight veil of clouds had drawn itself, " says Professor Tyndall, indescribing his solitary ascent of Monte Rosa, "between me and thesun, and this was flooded with the most brilliant dyes. Orange, red, green, blue--all the hues produced by diffraction--wereexhibited in the utmost splendor. 

"Three times during my ascent (the short ascent of the last peak)similar veils drew themselves across the sun, and at each passagethe splendid phenomena were renewed. There seemed a tendency toform circular zones of color round the sun; but the clouds were notsufficiently uniform to permit of this, and they were consequentlybroken into spaces, each steeped with the color due to thecondition of the cloud at the place. "

Three times, you observe, the veil passed, and three times anothercame, or the first faded and another formed; and so it is always, as far as I have registered prismatic cloud: and the most beautifulcolors I ever saw were on those that flew fastest. 

This second diagram is enlarged admirably by Mr. Arthur Severn frommy sketch of the sky in the afternoon of the 6th of August, 1880, at Brantwood, two hours before sunset. You are looking west bynorth, straight towards the sun, and nearly straight towards thewind. From the west the wind blows fiercely towards you out of theblue sky. Under the blue space is a flattened dome of earth-cloudclinging to, and altogether masking the form of, the mountain, known as the Old Man of Coniston. 

The top of that dome of cloud is two thousand eight hundred feetabove the sea, the mountain two thousand six hundred, the cloudlying two hundred feet deep on it. Behind it, westward and seaward, all's clear; but when the wind out of that blue clearness comesover the ridge of the earth-cloud, at that moment and that line, itsown moisture congeals into these white--I believe, _ice_-clouds;threads, and meshes, and tresses, and tapestries, flying, failing, melting, reappearing; spinning and unspinning themselves, coiling anduncoiling, winding and unwinding, faster than eye or thought canfollow: and through all their dazzling maze of frosty filaments shinesa painted window in palpitation; its pulses of color interwoven inmotion, intermittent in fire, --emerald and ruby and pale purple andviolet melting into a blue that is not of the sky, but of thesunbeam;--purer than the crystal, softer than the rainbow, andbrighter than the snow. 

But you must please here observe that while my first diagram didwith some adequateness represent to you the color facts therespoken of, the present diagram can only _explain_, not reproducethem. The bright reflected colors of clouds _can_ be represented inpainting, because they are relieved against darker colors, or, inmany cases, _are_ dark colors, the vermilion and ruby clouds beingoften much darker than the green or blue sky beyond them. But inthe case of the phenomena now under your attention, the colors areall _brighter than pure white_, --the entire body of the cloud inwhich they show themselves being white by transmitted light, sothat I can only show you what the colors are, and where theyare, --but leaving them dark on the white ground. Only artificial, and very high illumination would give the real effect ofthem, --painting cannot. 

Enough, however, is here done to fix in your minds the distinctionbetween those two species of cloud, --one, either stationary, [16] orslow in motion, _reflecting unresolved_ light; the other, fast-flying, and _transmitting resolved_ light. What difference isthere in the nature of the atoms, between those two kinds ofclouds? I leave the question with you for to-day, merely hinting toyou my suspicion that the prismatic cloud is of finely-comminutedwater, or ice, [17] instead of aqueous vapor; but the only clue Ihave to this idea is in the purity of the rainbow formed in frostmist, lying close to water surfaces. Such mist, however, onlybecomes prismatic as common rain does, when the sun is behind thespectator, while prismatic clouds are, on the contrary, alwaysbetween the spectator and the sun. 

The main reason, however, why I can tell you nothing yet aboutthese colors of diffraction or interference, is that, whenever Itry to find anything firm for you to depend on, I am stopped by thequite frightful inaccuracy of the scientific people's terms, whichis the consequence of their always trying to write mixed Latin andEnglish, so losing the grace of the one and the sense of the other. And, in this point of the diffraction of light I am stopped dead bytheir confusion of idea also, in using the words undulation andvibration as synonyms. "When, " says Professor Tyndall, "you aretold that the atoms of the sun _vibrate_ at different rates, andproduce _waves_ of different sizes, --your experience of water-waveswill enable you to form a tolerably clear notion of what is meant. "

'Tolerably clear'!--your toleration must be considerable, then. Doyou suppose a water-wave is like a harp-string? Vibration is themovement of a body in a state of tension, --undulation, that of abody absolutely lax. In vibration, not an atom of the body changesits place in relation to another, --in undulation, not an atom ofthe body remains in the same place with regard to another. Invibration, every particle of the body ignores gravitation, ordefies it, --in undulation, every particle of the body is slavishlysubmitted to it. In undulation, not one wave is like another; invibration, every pulse is alike. And of undulation itself, thereare all manner of visible conditions, which are not trueconditions. A flag ripples in the wind, but it does not undulate asthe sea does, --for in the sea, the water is taken from the troughto put on to the ridge, but in the flag, though the motion isprogressive, the bits of bunting keep their place. You see a fieldof corn undulating as if it was water, --it is different from theflag, for the ears of corn bow out of their places and return tothem, --and yet, it is no more like the undulation of the sea, thanthe shaking of an aspen leaf in a storm, or the lowering of thelances in a battle. 

And the best of the jest is, that after mixing up these two notionsin their heads inextricably, the scientific people apply both whenneither will fit; and when all undulation known to us presumesweight, and all vibration, impact, --the undulating theory of lightis proposed to you concerning a medium which you can neither weighnor touch!

All _communicable_ vibration--of course I mean--and in dead matter:_You_ may fall a shivering on your own account, if you like, butyou can't get a billiard-ball to fall a shivering on _its_ ownaccount. [18]

Yet observe that in thus signalizing the inaccuracy of the terms inwhich they are taught, I neither accept, nor assail, theconclusions respecting the oscillatory states of light, heat, andsound, which have resulted from the postulate of an elastic, thoughimpalpable and imponderable ether, possessing the elasticity ofair. This only I desire you to mark with attention, --that bothlight and sound are _sensations_ of the animal frame, which remain, and must remain, wholly inexplicable, whatever manner of force, pulse, or palpitation may be instrumental in producing them: nordoes any such force _become_ light or sound, except in itsrencontre with an animal. The leaf hears no murmur in the wind towhich it wavers on the branches, nor can the clay discern thevibration by which it is thrilled into a ruby. The Eye and the Earare the creators alike of the ray and the tone; and the conclusionfollows logically from the right conception of their livingpower, --"He that planted the Ear, shall He not hear? He that formedthe Eye, shall not He see?"

For security, therefore, and simplicity of definition of light, youwill find no possibility of advancing beyond Plato's "the powerthat through the eye manifests color, " but on that definition, youwill find, alike by Plato and all great subsequent thinkers, a_moral_ Science of Light founded, far and away more important toyou than all the physical laws ever learned by vitreous revelation. Concerning which I will refer you to the sixth lecture which I gaveat Oxford in 1872, on the relation of Art to the Science of Light('The Eagle's Nest'), reading now only the sentence introducing itssubject:--"The 'Fiat lux' of creation is therefore, in the deepsense, 'fiat anima, ' and is as much, when you understand it, theordering of Intelligence as the ordering of Vision. It is theappointment of change of what had been else only a mechanicaleffluence from things unseen to things unseeing, --from Stars, thatdid not shine, to Earth, that did not perceive, --the change, I say, of that blind vibration into the glory of the Sun and Moon forhuman eyes: so making possible the communication out of theunfathomable truth of that portion of truth which is good for us, and animating to us, and is set to rule over the day and over thenight of our joy and our sorrow. "

Returning now to our subject at the point from which I permittedmyself, I trust not without your pardon, to diverge; you mayincidentally, but carefully, observe, that the effect of such a skyas that represented in the second diagram, so far as it can beabstracted or conveyed by painting at all, implies the totalabsence of any pervading warmth of tint, such as artists usuallycall 'tone. ' Every tint must be the purest possible, and above allthe white. Partly, lest you should think, from my treatment ofthese two phases of effect, that I am insensible to the quality oftone, --and partly to complete the representation of states ofweather undefiled by plague-cloud, yet capable of the most solemndignity in saddening color, I show you, Diagram 3, the record of anautumn twilight of the year 1845, --sketched while I was changinghorses between Verona and Brescia. The distant sky in this drawingis in the glowing calm which is always taken by the great Italianpainters for the background of their sacred pictures; a broad fieldof cloud is advancing upon it overhead, and meeting othersenlarging in the distance; these are rain-clouds, which willcertainly close over the clear sky, and bring on rain beforemidnight: but there is no power in them to pollute the sky beyondand above them: they do not darken the air, nor defile it, nor inany way mingle with it; their edges are burnished by the sun likethe edges of golden shields, and their advancing march is asdeliberate and majestic as the fading of the twilight itself into adarkness full of stars. 

These three instances are all I have time to give of the formerconditions of serene weather, and of non-electric rain-cloud. But Imust yet, to complete the sequence of my subject, show you oneexample of a good, old-fashioned, healthy, and mighty, storm. 

In Diagram 4, Mr. Severn has beautifully enlarged my sketch of aJuly thundercloud of the year 1858, on the Alps of the Vald'Aosta, seen from Turin, that is to say, some twenty-five orthirty miles distant. You see that no mistake is possible hereabout what is good weather and what bad, or which is cloud andwhich is sky; but I show you this sketch especially to give you thescale of heights for such clouds in the atmosphere. These thundercumuli entirely _hide_ the higher Alps. It does not, however, follow that they have buried them, for most of their own aspect ofheight is owing to the approach of their nearer masses; but at allevents, you have cumulus there rising from its base, at about threethousand feet above the plain, to a good ten thousand in the air. 

White cirri, in reality parallel, but by perspective radiating, catch the sunshine above, at a height of from fifteen to twentythousand feet; but the storm on the mountains gathers itself into afull mile's depth of massy cloud, every fold of it involved withthunder, but every form of it, every action, every color, magnificent:--doing its mighty work in its own hour and its owndominion, nor snatching from you for an instant, nor defiling witha stain, the abiding blue of the transcendent sky, or the frettedsilver of its passionless clouds. 

We so rarely now see cumulus cloud of this grand kind, that I willyet delay you by reading the description of its nearer aspect, inthe 'Eagle's Nest. '

"The rain which flooded our fields the Sunday before last, wasfollowed, as you will remember, by bright days, of which Tuesdaythe 20th (February, 1872) was, in London, notable for the splendor, towards the afternoon, of its white cumulus clouds. There has beenso much black east wind lately, and so much fog and artificialgloom, besides, that I find it is actually some two years since Ilast saw a noble cumulus cloud under full light. I chanced to bestanding under the Victoria Tower at Westminster, when the largestmass of them floated past, that day, from the northwest; and I wasmore impressed than ever yet by the awfulness of the cloud-form, and its unaccountableness, in the present state of our knowledge. The Victoria Tower, seen against it, had no magnitude: it was likelooking at Mont Blanc over a lamp-post. The domes of cloud-snowwere heaped as definitely: their broken flanks were as gray andfirm as rocks, and the whole mountain, of a compass and height inheaven which only became more and more inconceivable as the eyestrove to ascend it, was passing behind the tower with a steadymarch, whose swiftness must in reality have been that of a tempest:yet, along all the ravines of vapor, precipice kept pace withprecipice, and not one thrust another. 

"What is it that hews them out? Why is the blue sky purethere, --the cloud solid here; and edged like marble: and why doesthe state of the blue sky pass into the state of cloud, in thatcalm advance?

"It is true that you can more or less imitate the forms of cloudwith explosive vapor or steam; but the steam melts instantly, andthe explosive vapor dissipates itself. The cloud, of perfect form, proceeds unchanged. It is not an explosion, but an enduring andadvancing presence. The more you think of it, the less explicableit will become to you. "

Thus far then of clouds that were once familiar; now at last, entering on my immediate subject, I shall best introduce it to youby reading an entry in my diary which gives progressive descriptionof the most gentle aspect of the modern plague-cloud. 

 "_Bolton Abbey, 4th July, 1875. _

Half-past eight, morning; the first bright morning for the lastfortnight. 

At half-past five it was entirely clear, and entirely calm; themoorlands glowing, and the Wharfe glittering in sacred light, andeven the thin-stemmed field-flowers quiet as stars, in the peace inwhich--

 'All trees and simples, great and small, That balmy leaf do bear, Than they were painted on a wall, No more do move, nor steir. '

But, an hour ago, the leaves at my window first shook slightly. They are now trembling _continuously_, as those of all the trees, under a gradually rising wind, of which the tremulous actionscarcely permits the direction to be defined, --but which falls andreturns in fits of varying force, like those which precede athunderstorm--never wholly ceasing: the direction of its uppercurrent is shown by a few ragged white clouds, moving fast from thenorth, which rose, at the time of the first leaf-shaking, behindthe edge of the moors in the east. 

This wind is the plague-wind of the eighth decade of years in thenineteenth century; a period which will assuredly be recognized infuture meteorological history as one of phenomena hitherto unrecordedin the courses of nature, and characterized pre-eminently by thealmost ceaseless action of this calamitous wind. While I have beenwriting these sentences, the white clouds above specified haveincreased to twice the size they had when I began to write; and inabout two hours from this time--say by eleven o'clock, if the windcontinue, --the whole sky will be dark with them, as it was yesterday, and has been through prolonged periods during the last five years. Ifirst noticed the definite character of this wind, and of the cloudsit brings with it, in the year 1871, describing it then in the Julynumber of 'Fors Clavigera'; but little, at that time, apprehendingeither its universality, or any probability of its annual continuance. I am able now to state positively that its range of power extends fromthe North of England to Sicily; and that it blows more or less duringthe whole of the year, except the early autumn. This autumnalabdication is, I hope, beginning: it blew but feebly yesterday, thoughwithout intermission, from the north, making every shady place cold, while the sun was burning; its effect on the sky being only to dim theblue of it between masses of ragged cumulus. To-day it has entirelyfallen; and there seems hope of bright weather, the first for me sincethe end of May, when I had two fine days at Aylesbury; the third, May 28th, being black again from morning to evening. There seems to besome reference to the blackness caused by the prevalence of this windin the old French name of Bise, '_gray_ wind'; and, indeed, one of thedarkest and bitterest days of it I ever saw was at Vevay in 1872. "

 * * * * *

The first time I recognized the clouds brought by the plague-windas distinct in character was in walking back from Oxford, after ahard day's work, to Abingdon, in the early spring of 1871: it wouldtake too long to give you any account this evening of theparticulars which drew my attention to them; but during thefollowing months I had too frequent opportunities of verifying myfirst thoughts of them, and on the first of July in that year wrotethe description of them which begins the 'Fors Clavigera' ofAugust, thus:--

"It is the first of July, and I sit down to write by the dismalestlight that ever yet I wrote by; namely, the light of this midsummermorning, in mid-England, (Matlock, Derbyshire), in the year 1871. 

"For the sky is covered with gray cloud;--not rain-cloud, but a dryblack veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused inmist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. Andeverywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they dobefore a thunder-storm; only not violently, but enough to show thepassing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind. Dismalenough, had it been the first morning of its kind that summer hadsent. But during all this spring, in London, and at Oxford, throughmeager March, through changelessly sullen April, throughdespondent May, and darkened June, morning after morning hascome gray-shrouded thus. 

"And it is a new thing to me, and a very dreadful one. I am fiftyyears old, and more; and since I was five, have gleaned the besthours of my life in the sun of spring and summer mornings; and Inever saw such as these, till now. 

"And the scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun, andthe moon, and the seven stars, and can tell me all about _them_, Ibelieve, by this time; and how they move, and what they are madeof. 

"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 thanthey 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 thisbitter wind comes from, and what _it_ is made of. 

"For, perhaps, with forethought, and fine laboratory science, onemight make it of something else. 

"It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; verypossibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneysin a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke wouldnot blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if itwere made of dead men's souls--such of them as are not gone yetwhere 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 ofthem haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be manyabout us, just now, displeased enough!"

The last sentence refers of course to the battles of theFranco-German campaign, which was especially horrible to me, in itsdigging, as the Germans should have known, a moat flooded withwaters 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 ofthe 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 oftormenting winds, whether from the north or east were more or lesscapable of co-existing with sunlight, and often with steady andbright 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 onequarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all, attachingits own bitterness and malice to the worst characters of the properwinds of each quarter. It will blow either with drenching rain, ordry rage, from the south, --with ruinous blasts from the west, --withbitterest chills from the north, --and with venomous blight from theeast. 

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

3. It always blows _tremulously_, making the leaves of the treesshudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulnesswhich gives them--and I watch them this moment as I write--anexpression of anger as well as of fear and distress. You may seethe kind of quivering, and hear the ominous whimpering, in thegusts that precede a great thunderstorm; but plague-wind is morepanic-struck, and feverish; and its sound is a hiss instead of awail. 

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 anymeans of pictorial effect, except a few old curtains, and a bluelight or two. But the night on the Brocken was neverthelessextremely appalling to me, --a strange ghastliness being obtained insome of the witch scenes merely by fine management of gesture anddrapery; and in the phantom scenes, by the half-palsied, half-furious, faltering or fluttering past of phantoms stumbling asinto graves; as if of not only soulless, but senseless, Dead, moving with the very action, the rage, the decrepitude, and thetrembling 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, andis as inevitable as the Gulf Stream; but also there are days whenit is contending with healthy weather, and on such days it willremit for half an hour, and the sun will begin to show itself, andthen the wind will come back and cover the whole sky with cloudsin 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 incolor, the light being never for two seconds the same from morningtill evening. 

5. It degrades, while it intensifies, ordinary storm; but before Iread you any description of its efforts in this kind, I mustcorrect an impression which has got abroad through the papers, thatI speak as if the plague-wind blew now always, and there were nomore any natural weather. On the contrary, the winter of 1878-9 wasone of the most healthy and lovely I ever saw ice in;--Conistonlake shone under the calm clear frost in one marble field, asstrong as the floor of Milan Cathedral, half a mile across and fourmiles down; and the first entries in my diary which I read youshall be from the 22d to 26th June, 1876, of perfectly lovely andnatural weather. 

 "_Sunday, 25th June, 1876. _

Yesterday, an entirely glorious sunset, unmatched in beauty sincethat at Abbeville, --deep scarlet, and purest rose, on purple gray, in bars; and stationary, plumy, sweeping filaments above in uppersky, like '_using up the brush_, ' said Joanie; remaining in glory, every moment best, changing from one good into another, (but onlyin color or light--_form steady_, ) for half an hour full, and theclouds afterwards fading into the gray against amber twilight, _stationary in the same form for about two hours_, at least. Thedarkening rose tint remained till half-past ten, the grand timebeing 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 faultas on a map. Divine beauty of western color on thyme androse, --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 andsunlight, all day. After breakfast, I came in from the well understrawberry bed, to say I had never seen anything like it, so pureor intense, in Italy; and so it went glowing on, cloudless, withsoft north wind, all day. 

 _16th July. _

The sunset almost too bright _through the blinds_ for me to readHumboldt at tea by, --finally, new moon like a lime-light, reflectedon breeze-struck water; traces, across dark calm, of reflectedhills. "

These extracts are, I hope, enough to guard you against theabsurdity of supposing that it all only means that I am myselfsoured, or doting, in my old age, and always in an ill humor. Depend upon it, when old men are worth anything, they are betterhumored than young ones; and have learned to see what good thereis, and pleasantness, in the world they are likely so soon to haveorders to quit. 

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

 _"22d June, 1876. _

Thunderstorm; pitch dark, with no _blackness_, --but deep, high, _filthiness_ of lurid, yet not sublimely lurid, smoke-cloud; densemanufacturing mist; fearful squalls of shivery wind, making Mr. Severn's sail quiver like a man in a fever fit--all about four, afternoon--but only two or three claps of thunder, and feeble, though near, flashes. I never saw such a dirty, weak, foul storm. It cleared suddenly, after raining all afternoon, at half-pasteight to nine, into pure, natural weather, --low rain-clouds onquite clear, green, wet hills. 

 _Brantwood, 13th August, 1879. _

The most terrific and horrible thunderstorm, this morning, I everremember. It waked me at six, or a little before--then rollingincessantly, like railway luggage trains, quite ghastly in itsmockery of them--the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog, like smoke; scarcely raining at all, but increasing to heavierrollings, with flashes quivering vaguely through all the air, andat last terrific double streams of reddish-violet fire, not forkedor zigzag, but rippled rivulets--two at the same instant sometwenty to thirty degrees apart, and lasting on the eye at leasthalf a second, with grand artillery-peals following; not rattlingcrashes, or irregular cracklings, but delivered volleys. It lastedan hour, then passed off, clearing a little, without rain to speakof, --not a glimpse of blue, --and now, half-past seven, seemssettling down again into Manchester devil's darkness. 

Quarter to eight, morning. --Thunder returned, all the air collapsedinto one black fog, the hills invisible, and scarcely visible theopposite shore; heavy rain in short fits, and frequent, though lessformidable, flashes, and shorter thunder. While I have written thissentence the cloud has again dissolved itself, like a nastysolution in a bottle, with miraculous and unnatural rapidity, andthe hills are in sight again; a double-forked flash--rippled, Imean, like the others--starts into its frightful ladder of lightbetween me and Wetherlam, as I raise my eyes. All black above, arugged spray cloud on the Eaglet. (The 'Eaglet' is my own name forthe bold and elevated crag to the west of the little lake aboveConiston mines. It had no name among the country people, and is oneof the most conspicuous features of the mountain chain, as seenfrom Brantwood. )

Half-past eight. --Three times light and three times dark since lastI wrote, and the darkness seeming each time as it settles moreloathsome, at last stopping my reading in mere blindness. One luridgleam of white cumulus in upper lead-blue sky, seen for half aminute through the sulphurous chimney-pot vomit of blackguardlycloud beneath, where its rags were thinnest. 

 _Thursday, 22d Feb. 1883. _

Yesterday a fearfully dark mist all afternoon, with steady, southplague-wind of the bitterest, nastiest, poisonous blight, andfretful flutter. I could scarcely stay in the wood for the horrorof it. To-day, really rather bright blue, and bright semi-cumuli, with the frantic Old Man blowing sheaves of lancets and chiselsacross the lake--not in strength enough, or whirl enough, to raiseit in spray, but tracing every squall's outline in black on thesilver gray waves, and whistling meanly, and as if on a flute madeof a file. 

 _Sunday, 17th August, 1879. _

Raining in foul drizzle, slow and steady; sky pitch-dark, and Ijust get a little light by sitting in the bow-window; diabolicclouds over everything: and looking over my kitchen gardenyesterday, I found it one miserable mass of weeds gone to seed, theroses in the higher garden putrefied into brown sponges, feelinglike dead snails; and the half-ripe strawberries all rotten at thestalks. "

6. And now I come to the most important sign of the plague-wind andthe plague-cloud: that in bringing on their peculiar darkness, they_blanch_ the sun instead of reddening it. And here I must notebriefly to you the uselessness of observation by instruments, ormachines, instead of eyes. In the first year when I had begun tonotice the specialty of the plague-wind, I went of course to theOxford observatory to consult its registrars. They have theiranemometer always on the twirl, and can tell you the force, or atleast the pace, of a gale, [19] by day or night. But the anemometercan only record for you how often it has been driven round, not atall whether it went round _steadily_, or went round _trembling_. And on that point depends the entire question whether it is aplague breeze or a healthy one: and what's the use of telling youwhether the wind's strong or not, when it can't tell you whetherit's a strong medicine, or a strong poison?

But again--you have your _sun_-measure, and can tell exactly at anymoment how strong, or how weak, or how wanting, the sun is. But thesun-measurer can't tell you whether the rays are stopped by a dense_shallow_ cloud, or a thin _deep_ one. In healthy weather, the sunis hidden behind a cloud, as it is behind a tree; and, when thecloud is past, it comes out again, as bright as before. But inplague-wind, the sun is choked out of the whole heaven, all daylong, by a cloud which may be a thousand miles square and fivemiles deep. 

And yet observe: that thin, scraggy, filthy, mangy, miserablecloud, for all the depth of it, can't turn the sun red, as a good, business-like fog does with a hundred feet or so of itself. By theplague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half roundthe world; in a London fog the air itself is pure, though youchoose to mix up dirt with it, and choke yourself with your ownnastiness. 

Now I'm going to show you a diagram of a sunset in entirely pureweather, above London smoke. I saw it and sketched it from my oldpost of observation--the top garret of my father's house at HerneHill. There, when the wind is south, we are outside of the smokeand above it; and this diagram, admirably enlarged from my owndrawing by my, now in all things best aide-de-camp, Mr. Collingwood, shows you an old-fashioned sunset--the sort of thingTurner and I used to have to look at, --(nobody else ever would)constantly. Every sunset and every dawn, in fine weather, hadsomething of the sort to show us. This is one of the last puresunsets I ever saw, about the year 1876, --and the point I want youto note in it is, that the air being pure, the smoke on thehorizon, though at last it hides the sun, yet hides it through goldand vermilion. Now, don't go away fancying there's any exaggerationin that study. The _prismatic_ colors, I told you, were simplyimpossible to paint; these, which are transmitted colors, canindeed be suggested, but no more. The brightest pigment we havewould look dim beside the truth. 

I should have liked to have blotted down for you a bit ofplague-cloud to put beside this; but Heaven knows, you can seeenough of it now-a-days without any trouble of mine; and if youwant, in a hurry, to see what the sun looks like through it, you'veonly to throw a bad half-crown into a basin of soap and water. 

Blanched Sun, --blighted grass, --blinded man. --If, in conclusion, you ask me for any conceivable cause or meaning of these things--Ican tell you none, according to your modern beliefs; but I can tellyou what meaning it would have borne to the men of old time. Remember, for the last twenty years, England, and all foreignnations, either tempting her, or following her, have blasphemed[20]the name of God deliberately and openly; and have done iniquity byproclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother asit is in his power to do. Of states in such moral gloom every seerof old predicted the physical gloom, saying, "The light shall bedarkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw theirshining. " All Greek, all Christian, all Jewish prophecy insists onthe same truth through a thousand myths; but of all the chief, toformer thought, was the fable of the Jewish warrior and prophet, for whom the sun hasted not to go down, with which I leave you tocompare at leisure the physical result of your own wars andprophecies, as declared by your own elect journal not fourteen daysago, --that the Empire of England, on which formerly the sun neverset, has become one on which he never rises. 

What is best to be done, do you ask me? The answer is plain. Whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you _can_ thesigns of the times. Whether you can bring the _sun_ back or not, you can assuredly bring back your own cheerfulness, and your ownhonesty. You may not be able to say to the winds, "Peace; bestill, " but you can cease from the insolence of your own lips, andthe troubling of your own passions. And all _that_ it would beextremely well to do, even though the day _were_ coming when thesun should be as darkness, and the moon as blood. But, the paths ofrectitude and piety once regained, who shall say that the promiseof old time would not be found to hold for us also?--"Bring ye allthe tithes into my storehouse, and prove me now herewith, saith theLord God, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pouryou out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receiveit. "

LECTURE II. 

 _March 11th, 1884. _

It was impossible for me, this spring, to prepare, as I wished tohave done, two lectures for the London Institution: but finding itsmembers more interested in the subject chosen than I hadanticipated, I enlarged my lecture at its second reading by someexplanations and parentheses, partly represented, and partlyfarther developed, in the following notes; which led me on, however, as I arranged them, into branches of the subject untouchedin the former lecture, and it seems to me of no inferior interest. 

[Footnote 1: The vapor over the pool of Anger in the 'Inferno, ' theclogging stench which rises from Caina, and the fog of the circleof Anger in the 'Purgatorio' resemble, indeed, the cloud of thePlague-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 ofugly ones as 'unnatural. ' In the conception of recent philosophy, the world is one Kosmos in which diphtheria is held to be asnatural as song, and cholera as digestion. To my own mind, and themore distinctly the more I see, know, and feel, the Earth, asprepared for the abode of man, appears distinctly ruled by agenciesof health and disease, of which the first may be aided by hisindustry, prudence, and piety; while the destroying laws areallowed to prevail against him, in the degree in which he allowshimself in idleness, folly, and vice. Had the point been distinctlyindicated where the degrees of adversity necessary for hisdiscipline pass into those intended for his punishment, the worldwould have been put under a manifest theocracy; but the declarationof the principle is at least distinct enough to have convinced allsensitive and earnest persons, from the beginning of speculation inthe eyes and mind of Man: and it has been put in my power by oneof the singular chances which have always helped me in my work whenit was in the right direction, to present to the Universityof Oxford the most distinct expression of this first principleof mediæval Theology which, so far as I know, exists infifteenth-century art. It is one of the drawings of the Florentinebook which I bought for a thousand pounds, against the BritishMuseum, some ten or twelve years since; being a compendium ofclassic and mediæval religious symbolism. In the two pages of it, forming one picture, given to Oxford, the delivery of the Law onSinai is represented on the left hand, (_contrary to the Scripturalnarrative_, but in deeper expression of the benediction of theSacred Law to all nations, ) as in the midst of bright and calmlight, the figure of the Deity being supported by luminous andlevel clouds, and attended by happy angels: while opposite, on theright hand, the worship of the Golden Calf is symbolized by asingle decorated pillar, with the calf on its summit, surrounded bythe clouds and darkness of a furious storm, issuing from the mouthsof fiends;--uprooting the trees, and throwing down the rocks, abovethe broken tables of the Law, of which the fragments lie in theforeground. ]

[Footnote 2: These conditions are mainly in the arrangement of thelower rain-clouds in flakes thin and detached enough to beilluminated by early or late sunbeams: their textures are then moresoftly blended than those of the upper cirri, and have thequalities 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 formsoft level fields, which melt imperceptibly into the blue; or whenof less extent, gather into apparent bars, crossing the sheets ofbroader cloud above; and all these bathed throughout in anunspeakable light of pure rose-color, and purple, and amber, andblue, not shining, but misty-soft, the barred masses, when seennearer, found to be woven in tresses of cloud, like floss silk, looking as if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf of lightedrain. 

"No clouds form such skies, none are so tender, various, inimitable; Turner himself never caught them. Correggio, puttingout 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 forHalicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself--throughher death--and _to_ his own; while the subsequent refusal ofEngland to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, hasalways 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 epithetvainly, --he is the most accurate, and therefore the most powerful, of all modern describers. The deepening of the cloud is essentiallynecessary to the redness of the orb. Ordinary observers arecontinually unaware of this fact, and imagine that a red sun can bedarker than the sky round it! Thus Mr. Gould, though a professednaturalist, and passing most of his life in the open air, over andover again, in his 'British Birds, ' draws the setting sun dark onthe sky!]

[Footnote 5: 'Like the blood he predicts. '--The astrological powerof the planet Mars was of course ascribed to it in the sameconnection with its red color. The reader may be interested to seethe notice, in 'Modern Painters, ' of Turner's constant use of thesame symbol; partly an expression of his own personal feeling, partly, the employment of a symbolic language known to all carefulreaders of solar and stellar tradition. 

"He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the associationof any subject with circumstances of death, especially the death ofmultitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply _crimsoned_sunset skies. 

"The color of blood is thus plainly taken for the leading tone inthe storm-clouds above the 'Slave-ship. ' It occurs with similardistinctness in the much earlier picture of 'Ulysses andPolypheme, ' in that of 'Napoleon at St. Helena, ' and, subdued bysofter hues, in the 'Old Téméraire. '

"The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet and crimson, the deepestin tone of all that I know in Turner's drawings. 

"Another feeling, traceable in several of his former works, is anacute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idlepleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time forlabor, or knowledge, or delight, is passed forever. There isevidence of this feeling in the introduction of the boys at play inthe churchyard of Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for hiskite among the thickets above the little mountain churchyard ofBrignal-bank; it is in the same tone of thought that he has placedhere the two figures fishing, leaning against these shatteredflanks of rock, --the sepulchral stones of the great mountain Fieldof Death. "]

[Footnote 6: 'Thy lore unto calamity. '--It is, I believe, recognized by all who have in any degree become interested in thetraditions of Chaldean astrology, that its warnings weredistinct, --its promises deceitful. Horace thus warns Leuconoeagainst reading the Babylonian numbers to learn the time of herdeath, --he does not imply their promise of previous happiness; andthe continually deceptive character of the Delphic oracle itself, tempted always rather to fatal than to fortunate conduct, unlessthe inquirer were more than wise in his reading. Byron gathers intothe bitter question all the sorrow of former superstition, while inthe lines italicized, just above, he sums in the briefest andplainest English, all that we yet know, or may wisely think, aboutthe Sun. It is the '_Burning_ oracle' (other oracles there are bysound, or feeling, but this by fire) of all that lives; the onlymeans of our accurate knowledge of the things round us, and thataffect our lives: it is the _fountain_ of all life, --Byron does notsay the _origin_;--the origin of life would be the origin of thesun itself; but it is the visible _source_ of vital energy, as thespring is of a stream, though the origin is the sea. "And symbol ofHim who bestows it. "--This the sun has always been, to every onewho believes there is a bestower; and a symbol so perfect andbeautiful that it may also be thought of as partly an apocalypse. ]

[Footnote 7: 'More beautiful in that variety. '--This line, with theone italicized beneath, expresses in Myrrha's mind, the feelingwhich I said, in the outset, every thoughtful watcher of heavennecessarily had in those old days; whereas now, the variety is forthe most part, only in modes of disagreeableness; and the vapor, instead of adding light to the unclouded sky, takes away the aspectand destroys the functions of sky altogether. ]

[Footnote 8: 'Steam out of an engine funnel. '--Compare the sixthparagraph of Professor Tyndall's 'Forms of Water, ' and thefollowing seventh one, in which the phenomenon of transparent steambecoming opaque is thus explained. "Every bit of steam shrinks, when chilled, to a much more minute particle of water. The liquidparticles thus produced form a kind of water dust of exceedingfineness, which floats in the air, and is called a cloud. "

But the author does not tell us, in the first place, what is theshape or nature of a 'bit of steam, ' nor, in the second place, howthe contraction of the individual bits of steam is effected withoutany diminution of the whole mass of them, but on the contrary, during its steady _expansion_; in the third place he assumes thatthe particles of water dust are solid, not vesicular, which is notyet ascertained; in the fourth place, he does not tell us how theirnumber and size are related to the quantity of invisible moisturein the air; in the fifth place, he does not tell us how coolinvisible moisture differs from hot invisible moisture; and in thesixth, he does not tell us why the cool visible moisture stayswhile the hot visible moisture melts away. So much for the presentstate 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 ofvolatile power in substance; and of the visible states consequenton sudden--and presumably, therefore, imperfect--vaporization; asthe smoke of frankincense, or the sacred fume of modern devotionwhich now fills the inhabited world, as that of the rose and violetits deserts. What, --it would be useful to know, is the actual bulkof an atom of orange perfume?--what of one of vaporized tobacco, orgunpowder?--and where do _these_ artificial vapors fall back inbeneficent rain? or through what areas of atmosphere exist, asinvisible, 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 allowspace only for the last, which expresses the final difficulties ofthe matter better than anything said in this lecture:--

"But farther: these questions of volatility, and visibility, andhue, are all complicated with those of shape. How is a cloudoutlined? Granted whatever you choose to ask, concerning itsmaterial, or its aspect, its loftiness and luminousness, --how ofits limitation? What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web?Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spacesequally, or with gradual diminution. You cannot have in the openair, angles, and wedges, and coils, and cliffs, of cold. Yet thevapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itselfacross the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braidsitself in and out, and across and across, like a tissue oftapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving shredsand tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels is the vaporpointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's clay? By whathands is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?"]

[Footnote 9: The opposed conditions of the higher and lower ordersof cloud, with the balanced intermediate one, are beautifully seenon mountain summits of rock or earth. On snowy ones they are farmore complex: but on rock summits there are three distinct forms ofattached cloud in serene weather; the first that of cloud veillaid over them, and _falling_ in folds through their ravines, (the obliquely descending clouds of the entering chorus inAristophanes); secondly, the ascending cloud, which develops itselfloosely and independently as it rises, and does not attach itselfto the hill-side, while the falling veil cloud clings to it closeall the way down;--and lastly the throned cloud, which rests indeedon the mountain summit, with its base, but rises high above intothe sky, continually changing its outlines, but holding its seatperhaps all day long. 

These three forms of cloud belong exclusively to calm weather;attached drift cloud, (see Note 11) can only be formed in thewind. ]

[Footnote 10: 'Glaciers of the Alps, ' page 10. --"Let a pound weightbe placed upon a cube of granite" (size of supposed cube notmentioned), "the cube is flattened, though in an infinitesimaldegree. Let the weight be removed, the cube remains a littleflattened. Let us call the cube thus flattened No. 1. Starting withNo. 1 as a new mass, let the pound weight be laid upon it. We havea more flattened mass, No. 2.... Apply this to squeezed rocks, tothose, for example, which form the base of an obelisk like theMatterhorn, --the conclusion seems inevitable _that the mountain issinking by its own weight_, " etc. , etc. Similarly the Nelson statuemust be gradually flattening the Nelson column, and in timeCleopatra's needle will be as flat as her pincushion?]

[Footnote 11: 'Glaciers of the Alps, ' page 146. --"The sun was nearthe western horizon, and I remained alone upon the Grat to see hislast beams illuminate the mountains, which, with one exception, were without a trace of cloud. 

"This exception was the Matterhorn, the appearance of which wasextremely instructive. The obelisk appeared to be divided in twohalves by a vertical line, drawn from its summit half-way down, tothe windward of which we had the bare cliffs of the mountain; andto the left of it a cloud which appeared to cling tenaciously tothe rocks. 

"In reality, however, there was no clinging; the condensed vaporincessantly got away, but it was ever renewed, and thus a river ofcloud had been sent from the mountain over the valley of Aosta. Thewind, in fact, blew lightly up the valley of St. Nicholas, chargedwith moisture, and when the air that held it _rubbed against thecold cone_ of the Matterhorn, the vapor was chilled andprecipitated in his lee. "

It is not explained, why the wind was not chilled by rubbingagainst any of the neighboring mountains, nor why the cone of theMatterhorn, mostly of rock, should be colder than cones of snow. The phenomenon was first described by De Saussure, who gives thesame 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 respectto the cap or helmet cloud, in the fifth volume of 'ModernPainters, ' page 124, in the terms given in the subjoined note, [A]but I still retained the explanation of Saussure for the lee-sidecloud, engraving in plate 69 the modes of its occurrence on theAiguille Dru, of which the most ordinary one was afterwardsrepresented by Tyndall in his 'Glaciers of the Alps, ' under thetitle of 'Banner-cloud. ' Its less imaginative title, in 'ModernPainters, ' of 'Lee-side cloud, ' is more comprehensive, for thiscloud forms often under the brows of far-terraced precipices, whereit has no resemblance to a banner. No true explanation of it hasever yet been given; for the first condition of the problem hashitherto been unobserved, --namely, that such cloud is constant incertain states of weather, under precipitous rocks;--but neverdeveloped with distinctness by domes of snow. 

[Illustration]

But my former expansion of Saussure's theory is at least closer tothe facts than Professor Tyndall's "rubbing against the rocks, " andI therefore allow room for it here, with its illustrative wood-cut. 

"When a moist wind blows in clear weather over a cold summit, ithas not time to get chilled as it approaches the rock, andtherefore the air remains clear, and the sky bright on the windwardside; 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 timeto be chilled by the rock, and the cloud appears, as a boiling massof white vapor, rising continually with the return current to theupper edge of the mountain, where it is caught by the straight windand partly torn, partly melted away in broken fragments. 

"In the accompanying figure, the dark mass represents the mountainpeak, the arrow the main direction of the wind, the curved linesshow the directions of such current and its concentration, and thedotted 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 didknow, but did not think of it, --that the covering or cap-cloudforms on hot summits as well as cold ones;--that the red and barerocks of Mont Pilate, hotter, certainly, after a day's sunshinethan the cold storm-wind which sweeps to them from the Alps, nevertheless have been renowned for their helmet of cloud, eversince the Romans watched the cloven summit, gray against the south, from the ramparts of Vindonissa, giving it the name from which thegood Catholics of Lucerne have warped out their favorite piece ofterrific sacred biography. And both my master and I should alsohave reflected that if our theory about its formation had beengenerally true, the helmet cloud ought to form on every coldsummit, at the approach of rain, in approximating proportions tothe bulk of the glaciers; which is so far from being the case thatnot only (A) the cap-cloud may often be seen on lower summits ofgrass or rock, while the higher ones are splendidly clear (whichmay be accounted for by supposing the wind containing the moisturenot to have risen so high); but (B) the cap-cloud always shows apreference for hills of a conical form, such as the Mole or Niesen, which can have very little power in chilling the air, evensupposing they were cold themselves; while it will entirely refuseto form huge masses of mountain, which, supposing them of chillytemperament, must have discomforted the atmosphere in theirneighborhood for leagues. "]]

[Footnote 12: See below, on the different uses of the word'reflection, ' note 14, and note that throughout this lecture I usethe words 'aqueous molecules, ' alike of water liquid or vaporized, not knowing under what conditions or at what temperatureswater-dust becomes water-gas; and still less, supposing purewater-gas blue, and pure air blue, what are the changes in eitherwhich make them what sailors call "dirty "; but it is one of theworst omissions of the previous lecture, that I have not statedamong the characters of the plague-cloud that it is _always_dirty, [A] and _never blue under any conditions_, neither when deepin the distance, nor when in the electric states which producesulphurous blues in natural cloud. But see the next note. 

[Footnote A: In my final collation of the lectures given at Oxfordlast year on the Art of England, I shall have occasion to takenotice of the effect of this character of plague-cloud on ouryounger painters, who have perhaps never in their lives seen a_clean_ sky!]]

[Footnote 13: Black clouds. --For the sudden and extreme localblackness of thundercloud, see Turner's drawing of Winchelsea, (England series), and compare Homer, of the Ajaces, in the 4th bookof the Iliad, --(I came on the passage in verifying Mr. Hill'squotation from the 5th. )

 "[Greek: hama de nephos eipeto pezôn. Hôs d' hot' apo skopiês eiden nephos aipolos anêr Erchomenon kata ponton hypo Zephyroio iôês, Tô de t', aneuthen eonti, melanteron, êute pissa Phainet', ion kata ponton, agei de te lailapa pollên; Rhigêsen te idôn, hypo te speos êlase mêla; Toiai ham Aiantessin arêithoôn aizêôn Dêion es polemon pykinai kinynto phalanges Kyaneai, ]"

I give Chapman's version--noting only that his _breath_ ofZephyrus, ought to have been 'cry' or 'roar' of Zephyrus, theblackness of the cloud being as much connected with the wildness ofthe wind as, in the formerly quoted passage, its brightness withcalm of air. 

 "Behind them hid the ground A cloud of foot, that seemed to smoke. And as a Goatherd spies On some hill top, out of the sea a rainy vapor rise, Driven by the breath of Zephyrus, which though far off he rests, Comes on as black as pitch, and brings a tempest in his breast Whereat he, frighted, drives his herds apace into a den; So, darkening earth, with swords and shields, showed these with all their men. "

I add here Chapman's version of the other passage, which isextremely beautiful and close to the text, while Pope's ishopelessly erroneous. 

 "Their ground they still made good, And in their silence and set powers, like fair still clouds they stood, With which Jove crowns the tops of hills in any quiet day When Boreas, and the ruder winds that use to drive away Air's _dusky vapors_, being _loose_, in many a whistling gale, Are pleasingly bound up and calm, and not a breath exhale. "]

[Footnote 14: 'Reflected. '--The reader must be warned in this placeof the difference implied by my use of the word 'cast' in page 11, and 'reflected' here: that is to say, between light or color whichan object possesses, whatever the angle it is seen at, and thelight which it reverberates at one angle only. The Alps, under therose[A] of sunset, are exactly of the same color whether you seethem from Berne or Schaffhausen. But the gilding to our eyes of aburnished cloud depends, I believe, at least for a measure of itsluster, upon the angle at which the rays incident upon it arereflected to the eye, just as much as the glittering of the seabeneath it--or the sparkling of the windows of the houses on theshore. 

Previously, at page 10, in calling the molecules of transparentatmospheric 'absolutely' unreflective of light, I mean, in likemanner, unreflective from their _surfaces_. Their blue color seenagainst a dark ground is indeed a kind of reflection, but one ofwhich I do not understand the nature. It is seen most simply inwood smoke, blue against trees, brown against clear light; but inboth 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 bytransmitted light, yellow rays passing through blue air: much yetremains to be known respecting translucent colors of this kind;only let them always be clearly distinguished in our minds from thefirmly possessed color of opaque substances, like grass ormalachite. 

[Footnote A: In speaking, at p. 11 of the first lecture, of thelimits of depth in the rose-color cast on snow, I ought to havenoted the greater strength of the tint possible under the light ofthe tropics. The following passage, in Mr. Cunningham's 'NaturalHistory of the Strait of Magellan, ' is to me of the greatestinterest, because of the beautiful effect described as seen on theoccasion of his visit to "the small town of Santa Rosa, " (nearValparaiso. ) "The day, though clear, had not been sunny, so that, although the snowy heights of the Andes had been distinctly visiblethroughout the greater part of our journey, they had not beenilluminated by the rays of the sun. But now, as we turned thecorner of a street, the chain of the Cordillera suddenly burst onour gaze in such a blaze of splendor that it almost seemed as ifthe windows of heaven had been opened for a moment, permitting aflood of _crimson_ light to stream forth upon the snow. The sightwas so unexpected, and so transcendently magnificent, that abreathless silence fell upon us for a few moments, while even thedriver stopped his horses. This deep red glow lasted for three orfour minutes, and then rapidly faded into that lovely rosy hue socharacteristic of snow at sunset among the Alps. "]]

[Footnote 15: Diffraction. --Since these passages were written, Ihave been led, in conversation with a scientific friend, to doubtmy statement that the colored portions of the lighted clouds werebrighter than the white ones. He was convinced that the resolutionof the rays would diminish their power, and in _thinking_ over thematter, I am disposed to agree with him, although my impression atthe time has been always that the diffracted colors rose out of thewhite, as a rainbow does out of the gray. But whatever the factsmay be, in this respect the statement in the text of theimpossibility of representing diffracted color in painting isequally true. It may be that the resolved hues are darker than thewhite, as colored panes in a window are darker than the colorlessglass, but all are alike in a key which no artifice of painting canapproach. 

For the rest, the phenomena of diffraction are not yet arrangedsystematically enough to be usefully discussed; some of theminvolving the resolution of the light, and others merely itsintensification. My attention was first drawn to them near St. Laurent, on the Jura mountains, by the vivid reflection, (so itseemed), of the image of the sun from a particular point of a cloudin the west, after the sun itself was beneath the horizon: but inthis image there were no prismatic colors, neither is theconstantly seen metamorphosis of pine forests into silver filigreeon ridges behind which the sun is rising or setting, accompaniedwith any prismatic hue; the trees become luminous, but notiridescent: on the other hand, in his great account of his ascentof Mont Blanc with Mr. Huxley, Professor Tyndall thus describes thesun's remarkable behavior on that occasion:--"As we attained thebrow which forms the entrance to the Grand Plateau, he _hung hisdisk upon a spike of rock_ to our left, and, surrounded by a gloryof interference spectra of the most gorgeous colors, blazed downupon us. " ('Glaciers of the Alps, ' p. 76. )

Nothing irritates me more, myself, than having the color of my owndescriptions of phenomena in anywise attributed by the reader toaccidental states either of my mind or body;--but I cannot, foronce, forbear at least the innocent question to Professor Tyndall, whether the extreme beauty of these 'interference spectra' may nothave been partly owing to the extreme _sobriety_ of the observer?no refreshment, it appears, having been attainable the night beforeat the Grands Mulets, except the beverage diluted with dirty snow, of which I have elsewhere quoted the Professor's pensivereport, --"my memory of that tea is not pleasant. "]

[Footnote 16: 'Either stationary or slow in motion, reflectingunresolved light. '

The rate of motion is of course not essentially connected with themethod of illumination; their connection, in this instance, needsexplanation of some points which could not be dealt with in thetime of a single lecture. 

It is before said, with reserve only, that "a cloud is where it isseen, and is not where it is not seen. " But thirty years ago, in'Modern Painters, ' I pointed out (see the paragraph quoted in note8th), the extreme difficulty of arriving at the cause of cloudoutline, or explaining how, if we admitted at any given moment theatmospheric moisture to be generally diffused, it could be chilledby formal _chills_ into formal clouds. How, for instance, in theupper cirri, a thousand little chills, alternating with a thousandlittle warmths, could stand still as a thousand little feathers. 

But the first step to any elucidation of the matter is in thefirmly 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, theair is absolutely calm at the ground surface, and the motion of itsupper currents extremely slow. There is no local reason assignablefor the presence of the cirri above, or of the thundercloud below. There is no conceivable cause either in the geology, or the moralcharacter, of the two sides of the town of Abbeville, to explainwhy there should be decorative fresco on the sky over the southernsuburb, and a muttering heap of gloom and danger over the northern. The electric cloud is as calm in motion as the harmless one; itchanges its forms, indeed; but imperceptibly; and, so far as canbe discerned, only at its own will is exalted, and with its ownconsent abased. 

But in my second diagram are shown forms of vapor sustaining atevery instant all kinds of varying local influences; beneath, fastened down by mountain attraction, above, flung afar bydistracting winds; here, spread abroad into blanched sheets beneaththe sunshine, and presently gathered into strands of coiled cordagein the shade. Their total existence is in metamorphosis, and theirevery aspect a surprise, or a deceit. ]

[Footnote 17: 'Finely comminuted water or _ice_. '

My impression that these clouds were glacial was at once confirmedby a member of my audience, Dr. John Rae, in conversation after thelecture, in which he communicated to me the perfectly definiteobservations which he has had the kindness to set down with theirdates 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 inthe snow-hut in which I passed the winter of 1853-4, at RepulseBay, 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, thecentral 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. Thesame was observed on the 27th of the month, but not so bright. Distance of clouds from sun, from 3° to 6°. '

On the 1st February the temperature was 38° below zero, and on the27th February 26° below. 

'On the 23d and 30th (of March) the same splendid appearance ofclouds as mentioned in last month's journal was observed. On thefirst of these days, about 10. 30 a. M. , it was extremely beautiful. The clouds were about 8° or 10° from the sun, below him andslightly to the eastward, --having a green fringe all round, thenpink; the center part at first green, and then pink or red. '

The temperature was 21° below zero, Fahrenheit. 

There may have been other colors--blue, perhaps--but I merely notedthe 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 sovisibly to my memory the appearance seen by me as above described, that I could not avoid remarking upon it. 

 Believe me very truly yours, JOHN RAE. " (M. D. , F. R. S. )

Now this letter enables me to leave the elements of your problemfor you in very clear terms. 

Your sky--altogether--may be composed of one or more of fourthings:--

 Molecules of water in warm weather. Molecules of ice in cold weather. Molecules of water-vapor in warm weather. Molecules of ice-vapor in cold weather. 

But of the size, distances, or modes of attraction between thesedifferent kinds of particles, I find no definite informationanywhere, except the somewhat vague statement by Sir WilliamThomson, that "if a drop of water could be magnified so as to be aslarge as the earth, and have a diameter of eight thousand miles, then a molecule of this water in it would appear _somewhat largerthan a shot_. " (What kind of shot?) "_and somewhat smaller than acricket-ball_"!

And as I finally review the common accounts given of cloudformation, I find it quite hopeless for the general reader to dealwith the quantity of points which have to be kept in mind andseverally valued, before he can account for any given phenomena. Ihave myself, in many of the passages of 'Modern Painters' beforereferred to, conceived of cloud too narrowly as always produced by_cold_, whereas the temperature of a cloud must continually, likethat of our visible breath in frosty weather, or of the visiblecurrent of steam, or the smoking of a warm lake surface undersudden frost, be above that of the surrounding atmosphere; and yetI never remember entering a cloud without being chilled by it, andthe darkness of the plague-wind, unless in electric states of theair, is always accompanied by deadly chill. 

Nor, so far as I can read, has any proper account yet been given ofthe balance, in serene air, of the warm air under the cold, inwhich the warm air is at once compressed by weight, and expanded byheat, and the cold air is thinned by its elevation, yet contractedby its cold. There is indeed no possibility of embracing theconditions in a single sentence, any more than in a single thought. But the practical balance is effected in calm air, so that itslower strata have no tendency to rise, like the air in a fireballoon, nor its higher strata to fall, unless they congeal intorain or snow. 

I believe it will be an extreme benefit to my younger readers if Iwrite for them a little 'Grammar of Ice and Air, ' collecting theknown facts on all these matters, and I am much minded to put by myecclesiastical history for a while, in order to relate what islegible of the history of the visible Heaven. 

[Footnote A: I trust that Dr. Rae will forgive my making the readerbetter aware of the real value of this communication by allowinghim to see also the following passage from the kind private letterby which it was supplemented:--

"Many years in the Hudson's Bay Company's service, I and my menbecame educated for Arctic work, in which I was five differenttimes employed, in two of which expeditions we lived wholly by ourown 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 theseexpeditions, 1846-7, my little party, there being no officer butmyself, surveyed seven hundred miles of coast of Arctic America bya sledge journey, which Parry, Ross, Bach, and Lyon had failed toaccomplish, costing the country about £70, 000 or £80, 000 at thelowest computation. The total expense of my little party, includingmy own pay, was under fourteen hundred pounds sterling. 

"My Arctic work has been recognized by the award of the founder'sgold medal of the Royal Geographical Society (before the completionof the whole of it). "]]

[Footnote 18: 'You can't get a billiard ball to fall a shivering onits own account. '--I am under correction in this statement by theLucasian professor of Cambridge, with respect to the molecules ofbodies capable of 'epipolizing' light. "Nothing seems more naturalthan to suppose that the incident vibrations of the luminiferousether produce vibratory movements among the ultimate molecules ofsensitive substances, and that the molecules in return, _swingingon their own account_, produce vibrations in the luminous ether, and thus cause the sensation of light. The periodic times of thesevibrations 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, andsuggestive of a perfectly regenerate theology. The 'Let there belight' of the former Creation is first expanded into 'Let there bea disposition of the molecules to swing, ' and the destinies ofmankind, no less than the vitality of the universe, dependthereafter upon this amiable, but perhaps capricious, and at allevents not easily influenced or anticipated, disposition!

Is it not also strange that in a treatise entering into so highmathematical analysis as that from which I quote, the false word'swing, ' expressing the action of a body liable to continuousarrest by gravitation, should be employed to signify theoscillation, wholly unaffected by gravity, of substance in whichthe motion once originated, may cease only with the essence of thebody?

It is true that in men of high scientific caliber, such as thewriter in this instance, carelessness in expression does not affectthe security of their conclusions. But in men of lower rank, mentaldefects in language indicate fatal flaws in thought. And althoughthe constant habit to which I owe my (often foolishly praised)"command of language"--of never allowing a sentence to pass proofin which I have not considered whether, for the vital word in it, abetter could be found in the dictionary, makes me somewhat morbidlyintolerant of careless diction, it may be taken for an extremelyuseful and practical rule, that if a man can think clearly he willwrite well, and that no good science was ever written in badEnglish. So that, before you consider whether a scientific authorsays a true or a false thing, you had better first look if he isable properly to say _any_thing, --and secondly, whether his conceitpermits him to say anything properly. 

Thus, when Professor Tyndall, endeavoring to write poetically ofthe sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are hisworkmanship, " you may observe, first, that since the sun is not aman, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurativestatement that he rejoices _as_ a strong man to run his course, isone which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting. And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even inthat figurative sense, the lilies of the field are the sun'sworkmanship, in the same sense the lilies of the hothouse are thestove's workmanship, --and in perfectly logical parallel, you, whoare alive here to listen to me, because you have been warmed andfed through the winter, are the workmanship of your owncoal-scuttles. 

Again, when Mr. Balfour Stewart begins a treatise on the'Conservation of Energy, ' which is to conclude, as we shall seepresently, with the prophecy of its total extinction as far as thepresent world is concerned, --by clothing in a "properly scientificgarb, " our innocent impression that there is some differencebetween the blow of a rifle stock and a rifle ball; he prepares forthe scientific toilet by telling us in italics that "the somethingwhich the rifle ball possesses in contradistinction to the riflestock is clearly the power of overcoming resistance, " since "it canpenetrate through oak-wood or through water--or (alas! that itshould be so often tried) through the human body; and _this powerof penetration_" (italics now mine) "_is the distinguishingcharacteristic of a substance moving with very great velocity_. Letus define by the term 'Energy, ' this power which the rifle ballpossesses 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 onlybe applied to the living--and of living, with perfect proprietyonly to the _mental_, action of animals, and that it could no morebe 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 smallforte and faculty of thought he himself possesses might have beenenergized so far as to perceive that the force of all inertlymoving bodies, whether rifle stock, rifle ball, or rolling world, is under precisely one and the same relation to their weights andvelocities; that the effect of their impact depends--not merely ontheir pace, but their constitution; and on the relative forms andstability of the substances they encounter, and that there is nomore quality of Energy, though much less quality of Art, in theswiftly penetrating shot, or crushing ball, than in thedeliberately contemplative and administrative puncture by a gnat'sproboscis, or a seamstress' needle. 

Mistakes of this kind, beginning with affectations of diction, donot always invalidate general statements or conclusions, --for a badwriter often equivocates out of a blunder as he equivocates intoone, --but I have been strict in pointing out the confusions of ideaadmitted in scientific books between the movement of a swing, thatof a sounding violin chord, and that of an agitated liquid, becausethese confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keepthe scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glaciermotion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultantquantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacialerosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely undo thedamage. ]

[Footnote 19: 'Force and pace. '--Among the nearer questions whichthe careless terminology on which I have dwelt in the above notehas left unsettled, I believe the reader will be surprised, as muchas I am myself, to find that of the mode of impulse in a commongust of wind! Whence is its strength communicated to it, and howgathered in it? and what is the difference of manner in the impulsebetween compressible gas and incompressible fluid? For instance:The water at the head of a weir is passing every instant fromslower into quicker motion; but (until broken in the air) the fastflowing water is just as dense as the slowly flowing water. But afan alternately compresses and rarefies the air between it and thecheek, and the violence of a destructive gust in a gale of windmeans a momentary increase in velocity and density of which Icannot myself in the least explain, --and find in no book ondynamics explained, --the mechanical causation. 

The following letter, from a friend whose observations on naturalhistory for the last seven or eight years have been consistentlyvaluable and instructive to me, will be found, with that subjoinedin the note, in various ways interesting; but especially in itsnotice of the inefficiency of ordinary instrumental registry insuch matters:--

 "6, MOIRA PLACE, SOUTHAMPTON, _Feb. 8th, 1884_. 

DEAR MR. RUSKIN, --Some time since I troubled you with a note or twoabout sea-birds, etc.... But perhaps I should never have venturedto trouble you again, had not your lecture on the 'Storm Clouds'touched a subject which has deeply interested me for years past. Ihad, of course, no idea that you had noticed this thing, though Imight have known that, living the life you do, you must have doneso. As for me, it has been a source of perplexity for years: somuch so, that I began to wonder at times whether I was not undersome mental delusion about it, until the strange theatricaldisplays, of the last few months, for which I was more or lessprepared, led so many to use their eyes, unmuzzled by brass orglass, for a time. I know you do not bother, or care much to readnewspapers, but I have taken the liberty of cutting out andsending a letter of mine, sent on the 1st January to an eveningpaper, [A] upon this subject, thinking you might like to know thatone person, at any rate, has seen that strange, bleared look aboutthe sun, shining so seldom except through a ghastly glare of pale, persistent haze. May it be that the singular coloring of thesunsets marks an end of this long period of plague-cloud, and thatin them we have promise of steadier weather? (No: those sunsetswere entirely distinct phenomena, and promised, if anything, onlyevil. --R. )

I was glad to see that in your lecture you gave the dependants uponthe instrument-makers a warning. On the 26th I had a heavysailing-boat lifted and blown, from where she lay hauled up, adistance of four feet, which, as the boat has four hundred-weightof iron upon her keel, gives a wind-gust, or force, not easilymeasured by instruments. 

 Believe me, dear Mr. Ruskin, Yours sincerely, ROBT. C. LESLIE. "

I am especially delighted, in this letter, by my friend'svigorously accurate expression, eyes "unmuzzled by brass or glass. "I have had occasion continually, in my art-lectures, to dwell onthe great law of human perception and power, that the beauty whichis good for us is prepared for the natural focus of the sight, andthe sounds which are delightful to us for the natural power of thenerves of the ear; and the art which is admirable in us, is theexercise of our own bodily powers, and not carving by sand-blast, nor oratorizing through a speaking trumpet, nor dancing with springheels. But more recently, I have become convinced that even inmatters of science, although every added mechanical power has itsproper use and sphere, yet the things which are vital to ourhappiness and prosperity can only be known by the rational use andsubtle skill of our natural powers. We may trust the instrumentwith the prophecy of storm, or registry of rainfall; but theconditions of atmospheric change, on which depend the health ofanimals and fruitfulness of seeds, can only be discerned by the eyeand the bodily sense. 

Take, for simplest and nearest example, this question of the stressof wind. It is not the actual _power_ that is immeasurable, if onlyit would stand to be measured! Instruments could easily now beinvented which would register not only a blast that could lift asailing boat, but one that would sink a ship of the line. But, lucklessly--the blast won't pose to the instrument! nor can theinstrument be adjusted to the blast. In the gale of which my friendspeaks in his next letter, 26th January, a gust came down the hillabove Coniston village upon two old oaks, which were well rooted inthe slate rock, and some fifty or sixty feet high--the one, sometwenty yards below the other. The blast tore the highest out of theground, peeling its roots from the rock as one peels anorange--swept the head of the lower tree away with it in one ruin, and snapped the two leader branches of the upper one over theother's stump, as one would break one's cane over some people'sheads, if one got the chance. In wind action of this kind theamount of actual force used is the least part of the business;--itis the suddenness of its concentration, and the lifting andtwisting strength, as of a wrestler, which make the blast fatal;none of which elements of storm-power can be recognized bymechanical tests. In my friend's next letter, however, he gives ussome evidence of the _consistent_ strength of this same gale, andof the electric conditions which attended it:--the prefatory noticeof his pet bird I had meant for 'Love's Meinie, ' but it will helpus through the grimness of our studies here. 

 "_March 3d, 1884. _

My small blackheaded gull Jack is still flourishing, and the timeis coming when I look for that singularly sudden change in theplumage of his head which took place last March. I have asked allmy ocean-going friends to note whether these little birds are notthe gulls _par excellence_ of the sea; and so far all I have heardfrom them confirms this. It seems almost incredible; but my son, asailor, who met that hurricane of the 26th of January, writes to meto 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 ofJacky's species, and they followed us half way across the Bay, seeming to find shelter under the lee of our ship. Some alightednow and then, and rested upon the water as if tired. ' When oneconsiders that these birds must have been at sea all that nightsomewhere, it gives one a great idea of their strength andendurance. My son's ship, though a powerful ocean steamer, was fortwo whole hours battling head to sea off the Eddystone that night, and for that time the lead gave no increase of soundings, so thatshe could have made no headway during those two hours; while allthe time her yards had the St. Elmo's fire at their ends, lookingas though a blue light was burning at each yard-arm, and this wasabout all they could see. 

 Yours sincerely, ROBT. C. LESLIE. "

The next letter, from a correspondent with whom I have the mostcomplete sympathy in some expressions of his postscript which areyet, I consider, more for my own private ear than for the publiceye, describes one of the more malignant phases of the plague-wind, which I forgot to notice in my lecture. 

 "BURNHAM, SOMERSET, _February 7th, 1884_. 

DEAR SIR, --I read with great interest your first lecture at Oxfordon cloud and wind (very indifferently reported in 'The Times'). Youhave given a name to a wind I've known for years. You call it theplague--I call it the devil-wind: _e. G. _, on April 29th, 1882, morning warmer, then rain storms from east; afternoon, rainsqualls; wind, west by south, rough; barometer falling awfully;4. 30 p. M. , tremendous wind. --April 30th, all the leaves of thetrees, all plants black and dead, as if a fiery blast had sweptover them. _All the hedges on windward side black as black tea. _

Another devil-wind came towards the end of last summer. The nextday, all the leaves were falling sere and yellow, as if it werelate autumn. 

 I am, dear sir, Yours faithfully, A. H. BIRKETT. "

I remember both these blights well; they were entirely terrific;but only sudden maxima of the constant morbific power of thiswind;--which, if Mr. Birkett saw my _personal_ notices of, intercalated among the scientific ones, he would find alluded to interms quite as vigorously damning as he could desire: and theactual effect of it upon my thoughts and work has been preciselythat which would have resulted from the visible phantom of an evilspirit, the absolute opponent of the Queen of the Air, --Typhonagainst Athena, --in a sense of which I had neither the experiencenor the conception when I wrote the illustrations of the myth ofPerseus in 'Modern Painters. ' Not a word of all those explanationsof Homer and Pindar could have been written in weather like thatof the last twelve years; and I am most thankful to have got themwritten, before the shadow came, and I could still see what Homerand Pindar saw. I quote one passage only--Vol. V. , p. 141--for thesake of a similitude which reminds me of one more thing I have tosay here--and a bit of its note--which I think is a precious littlepiece, not of word-painting, but of simply told feeling--(_that_, if people knew it, is my real power). 

"On the Yorkshire and Derbyshire hills, when the rain-cloud is lowand much broken, and the steady west wind fills all space with itsstrength, [B] the sun-gleams fly like golden vultures; they areflashes rather than shinings; the dark spaces and the dazzling raceand skim along the acclivities, and dart and _dip from crag todell, swallow-like_. "

The dipping of the shadows here described of course is caused onlyby that of the dingles they cross; but I have not in any of mybooks yet dwelt enough on the difference of character between thedipping and the mounting winds. Our wildest phase of the west windhere at Coniston is 'swallow-like' with a vengeance, coming down onthe lake in swirls which spurn the spray under them as a fieryhorse does the dust. On the other hand, the softly ascending windsexpress themselves in the grace of their cloud motion, as if set tothe continuous music of a distant song. [C]

The reader will please note also that whenever, either in 'ModernPainters' or elsewhere, I speak of rate of flight in clouds, I amthinking of it as measured by the horizontal distance overpast ingiven time, and not as apparent only, owing to the nearness of thespectator. All low clouds appear to move faster than high ones, thepace being supposed equal in both: but when I speak of quick orslow cloud, it is always with respect to a given altitude. In afine summer morning, a cloud will wait for you among the pines, folded to and fro among their stems, with a branch or two comingout here, and a spire or two there: you walk through it, and lookback to it. At another time, on the same spot, the fury ofcloud-flood drifts past you like the Rhine at Schaffhausen. 

The space even of the doubled lecture does not admit of my enteringinto any general statement of the action of the plague-cloud inSwitzerland and Italy; but I must not omit the following notes ofits 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 cleardark--all, against pure cirri, lighted beneath by sunrise; the sunof 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 coveringthe snowy ranges; the sun, as it rose to us here, shone only forabout ten minutes--gilding in its old glory the range of theDorons, --before one had time to look from peak to peak of it, theplague-cloud formed from the west, hid Mont Joli, and steadilychoked the valley with advancing streaks of dun-colored mist. Now--twenty minutes to nine--there is not _one ray_ of sunshine onthe whole valley, or on its mountains, from the Forclaz down toCluse. 

These phenomena are only the sequel of a series of still morestrange and sad conditions of the air, which have continued amongthe Savoy Alps for the last eight days, (themselves the sequel ofothers yet more general, prolonged, and harmful). But the weatherwas perfectly fine at Dijon, and I doubt not at Chamouni, on the1st 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 atMorez, in hot thunder-showers, with intervals of scorching sun; onthe 4th, 5th, and 6th there was nearly continuous rain at St. Cergues, the Alps being totally invisible all the time. The skycleared on the night of the 6th, and on the 7th I saw from the topof the Dole all the western plateaux of Jura quite clearly; but_the entire range of the Alps_, from the Moleson to the Salève, andall beyond, --snow, crag and hill-side, --were wrapped and buried inone unbroken gray-brown winding-sheet, of such cloud _as I hadnever seen till that day touch an Alpine summit_. 

The wind, from the east, (so that it blew _up_ over the edge of theDole cliff, and admitted of perfect shelter on the slope to thewest, ) was bitter cold, and extremely violent: the sun overhead, bright enough, and remained so during the afternoon; theplague-cloud reaching from the Alps only about as far as thesouthern shore of the lake of Geneva; but we could not see theSalève; nor even the north shore, farther than to Morges! I reachedthe Col de la Faucille at sunset, when, for a few minutes, the MontBlanc and Aiguille Verte showed themselves in dull red light, butwere buried again, before the sun was quite down, in the risingdeluge of cloud-poison. I saw no farther than the Voirons andBrezon--and scarcely those, during the electric heat of the 9th atGeneva; and last Saturday and Sunday have been mere whirls anddrifts of indecisive, but always sullen, storm. This morning I sawthe snows clear for the first time, having been, during the wholepast week, on steady watch for them. 

I have written that the clouds of the 7th were such as I neverbefore saw on the Alps. Often, during the past ten years, I haveseen them on my own hills, and in Italy in 1874; but it has alwayschanced to be fine weather, or common rain and cold, when I havebeen among the snowy chains; and now from the Dole for the firsttime 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 observerof the sky for a period of forty years; and I confess to a certainfeeling of astonishment at the way in which the "recent celestialphenomena" seem to have taken the whole body of scientificobservers by surprise. It would even appear that something likethese extraordinary sunsets was necessary to call the attention ofsuch observers to what has long been a source of perplexity to avariety of common folk, like sailors, farmers, and fishermen. Butto such people the look of the weather, and what comes of thatlook, is of far more consequence than the exact amount of ozone orthe depth or width of a band of the spectrum. 

'Now, to all such observers, including myself, it has been plainthat of late neither the look of the sky nor the character of theweather has been, as we should say, what it used to be; and thosewhose eyes were strong enough to look now and then toward the sunhave noticed a very marked increase of what some would call awatery look about him, which might perhaps be better expressed as awhite sheen or glare, at times developing into solar halo or mocksuns, as noted in your paper of the 2d of October last year. Afisherman would describe it as "white and davery-like. " So far asmy observation goes, this appearance was only absent here for alimited period during the present summer, when we had a week or twoof nearly normal weather; the summer before it was seldom absent. 

'Again, those whose business or pleasure has depended on the use ofwind-power have all remarked the strange persistence of hardwesterly and easterly winds, the westerly ones at times partakingof an almost trade-wind-like force and character. The summer of1882 was especially remarkable for these winds, while each stormyNovember has been followed by a period about mid-winter of mildcalm weather with dense fog. During these strong winds in summerand early autumn the weather would remain bright and sunny, and toa landsman would be not remarkable in any way, while the barometerhas been little affected by them; but it has been often observed bythose employed on the water that when it ceased blowing half a galethe sky at once became overcast, with damp weather or rain. Thismay all seem common enough to most people; but to those accustomedto gauge the wind by the number of reefs wanted in a mainsail orforesail it was not so; and the number of consecutive days when twoor more reefs have been kept tied down during the last few summershas been remarkable--alternating at times with equally persistentspells 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 Ihave just received from an old hand on board a large Australianclipper, he speaks of heavy gales and big seas off that coast inalmost the height of their summer. 

'Now, upon all this, in our season of long twilights, we havebursting upon us some clear weather; with a display of cloud-formsor vapor at such an elevation that, looking at them one day throughan opening in the nearer clouds, they seemed so distant as toresemble nothing but the delicate grain of ivory upon abilliard-ball. And yet with the fact that two-thirds of this earthis covered with water, and bearing in mind the effect which a verysmall increase of sun-power would have in producing cloud andlifting it above its normal level for a time, we are asked tobelieve that this sheen is all dust of some kind or other, in orderto explain what are now known as the "recent sunsets": though Iventure to think that we shall see more of them yet when the suncomes our way again. 

'At first sight, increased sun-power would seem to mean moresunshine; but a little reflection would show us that this would notbe for long, while any considerable addition to the sun's powerwould be followed by such a vast increase of vapor that we shouldonly see him, in our latitudes, at very short intervals. I am awarethat all this is most unscientific; but I have read column aftercolumn of explanation written by those who are supposed to know allabout such things, and find myself not a jot the wiser for it. Doyou know anybody who is?--I am, Sir, your obedient servant, 'AN UNSCIENTIFIC OBSERVER. (R. LESLIE. ) _January 1_. ']

[Footnote B: "I have been often at great heights on the Alps inrough weather, and have seen strong gusts of storm in the plains ofthe south. But, to get full expression of the very heart andmeaning of wind, there is no place like a Yorkshire moor. I thinkScottish breezes are thinner, very bleak and piercing, but notsubstantial. If you lean on them they will let you fall, but onemay rest against a Yorkshire breeze as one would on a quicksethedge. I shall not soon forget, --having had the good fortune tomeet a vigorous one on an April morning, between Hawes and Settle, just on the flat under Wharnside, --the vague sense of wonder _withwhich I watched Ingleborough stand without rocking_. "]

[Footnote C: Compare Wordsworth's

 "Oh beauteous birds, methinks ye measure Your movements to some heavenly tune. "

And again--

 "While the mists, Flying and rainy vapors, call out shapes, And phantoms from the crags and solid earth, As fast as a musician scatters sounds Out of an instrument. "

And again--

 "The Knight had ridden down from Wensley moor, With the slow motion of a summer cloud. "]]

[Footnote 20: 'Blasphemy. '--If the reader can refer to my papers onFiction in the 'Nineteenth Century, ' he will find this wordcarefully defined in its Scriptural, and evermore necessary, meaning, --'Harmful speaking'--not against God only, but againstman, and against all the good works and purposes of Nature. Theword is accurately opposed to 'Euphemy, ' the right or well-speakingof God and His world; and the two modes of speech are those whichgoing out of the mouth sanctify or defile the man. 

Going out of the mouth, that is to say, deliberately and ofpurpose. A French postilion's 'Sacr-r-ré'--loud, with the low 'Nomde Dieu' following between his teeth, is not blasphemy, unlessagainst his horse;--but Mr. Thackeray's close of his Waterloochapter in 'Vanity Fair, ' "And all the night long Amelia waspraying for George, who was lying on his face dead with a bulletthrough his heart, " is blasphemy of the most fatal and subtle kind. 

And the universal instinct of blasphemy in the modern vulgarscientific mind is above all manifested in its love of what isugly, and natural inthrallment by the abominable;--so that it isten to one if, in the description of a new bird, you learn muchmore of it than the enumerated species of vermin that stick to itsfeathers; and in the natural history museum of Oxford, humanity hasbeen hitherto taught, not by portraits of great men, but by theskulls of cretins. 

But the _deliberate_ blasphemy of science, the assertion of its ownvirtue and dignity against the always implied, and often asserted, vileness of all men and--Gods, --heretofore, is the most wonderfulphenomenon, so far as I can read or perceive, that hitherto hasarisen in the always marvelous course of the world's mentalhistory. 

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 forwonder at the extent to which Science has mastered the system ofnature. From age to age and from generation to generation, fact hasbeen added to fact and law to law, the true method and order of theUniverse being thereby more and more revealed. In doing this, Science has encountered and overthrown various forms ofsuperstition and deceit, of credulity and imposture. But the worldcontinually produces weak persons and wicked persons, and as longas 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, andSt. John[A]--as against a modern French gamin's. And what theresults of the intended education of English gamins of every degreein that new higher theology will be, England is I suppose by thistime beginning to discern. 

In the last 'Fors'[B] which I have written, on education of a saferkind, still possible, one practical point is insisted onchiefly, --that learning by heart, and repetition with perfectaccent and cultivated voice, should be made quite principalbranches of school discipline up to the time of going to theuniversity. 

And of writings to be learned by heart, among other passages ofindisputable philosophy and perfect poetry, I include certainchapters of the--now for the most part forgotten--wisdom ofSolomon; and of these, there is one selected portion which Ishould recommend not only school-boys and girls, but persons ofevery age, if they don't know it, to learn forthwith, as theshortest summary of Solomon's wisdom;--namely, the seventeenthchapter of Proverbs, which being only twenty-eight verses long, maybe fastened in the dullest memory at the rate of a verse a day inthe shortest month of the year. Out of the twenty-eight verses, Iwill read you seven, for example of their tenor, --the last of theseven I will with your good leave dwell somewhat upon. You haveheard the verses often before, but probably without rememberingthat they are all in this concentrated chapter. 

1. Verse 1. --Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, thana house full of good eating, with strife. 

(Remember, in reading this verse, that though England has chosenthe strife, and set every man's hand against his neighbor, herhouse is not yet so full of good eating as she expected, eventhough 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 preciousthing: only the melting-pot for the silver--the fierce furnace forthe 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 andswindling, you read Mr. Adam Smith and Mr. Stuart Mill, and othersuch political economists. )

4. Verse 5. --Whoso mocketh the poor, reproacheth his Maker. 

(Mocketh, --by saying that his poverty is his fault, no less thanhis misfortune, --England's favorite theory now-a-days. )

5. Verse 12. --Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, ratherthan a fool in his folly. 

(Carlyle is often now accused of false scorn in his calling thepassengers over London Bridge, "mostly fools, "--on the ground thatmen are only to be justly held foolish if their intellect is under, as only wise when it is above, the average. But the reader willplease observe that the essential function of modern education isto develop what capacity of mistake a man has. Leave him at hisforge and plow, --and those tutors teach him his true value, indulgehim in no error, and provoke him to no vice. But take him up toLondon, --give him her papers to read, and her talk to hear, --and itis fifty to one you send him presently on a fool's errand overLondon Bridge. )

6. Now listen, for this verse is the question you have mainly toask yourselves about your beautiful all-over-England system ofcompetitive examination:--

Verse 16. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to getwisdom, 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 helived 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 noticeof the more or less temporary phenomena of which I have to-nightgiven you register. But, from the constant arrangements of theuniverse, the same respecting which the thinkers of former timecame to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to endin good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite andextremely 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 andvery lugubrious author, who in his concluding chapter givesus, --founded, you will observe, on a series of 'ifs, '--the latestscientific views concerning the order of creation. "We have spokenalready about a medium pervading space"--this is the ScientificGod, you observe, differing from the unscientific one, in that thepurest in heart cannot see--nor the softest in heart feel--thisspacious 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 outby Thomson, that, looked at _in this light_, the universe is asystem that had a beginning and must have an end, for a process ofdegradation cannot be eternal. If we could view the Universe as acandle not lit, then it is perhaps conceivable to regard it ashaving been always in existence; but if we regard it rather as acandle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that itcannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will comewhen it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning inwhich the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, butendowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to anend in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inertmass, _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 cheerfulresult of telescopic and microscopic observation, and so at onceclose my lecture? or may I venture yet to trespass on your time bystating to you any of the more comfortable views held by personswho 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 ampretty well known to be precisely the one who cares least eitherfor hedge or ditch, when he chooses to go across country. It iscertainly true that I have not the least mind to pin my heart on mysleeve, for the daily daw, or nightly owl, to peck at; but theessential reason for my not telling you my own opinions on thismatter is--that I do not consider them of material consequence toyou. 

It _might_ possibly be of some advantage for you to know what--werehe now living, Orpheus would have thought, or Æschylus, or a Danielcome 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 smallmoment either to the Gods, the clouds, or ourselves. 

Of myself, however, if you care to hear it, I will tell you thusmuch: 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 beenwritten; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, wasfounded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing ofnature, all spring and summer long; and on the then demonstrablefact that over a great portion of the world's surface the air andthe earth were fitted to the education of the spirit of man asclosely as a school-boy's primer is to his labor, and as gloriouslyas 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 paststill 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, ordarkness, you can find in the conviction that you are nothing morethan brute beasts driven by brute forces, your other tutors cantell you--not I: but _this_ I can tell you--and with the authorityof all the masters of thought since time was time, --that, while byno manner of vivisection you can learn what a _Beast_ is, by onlylooking into your own hearts you may know what a _Man_ is, --andknow that his only true happiness is to live in Hope of somethingto 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 theobjects which can fulfill them may be by his effort gained, and byhis faith discerned; and his only earthly wisdom is to accept theunited testimony of the men who have sought these things in the waythey were commanded. Of whom no single one has ever said that hisobedience or his faith had been vain, or found himself cast outfrom the choir of the living souls, whether here, or departed, forwhom the song was written:--

 God be merciful unto us, and bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us; That Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all nations. 

 Oh let the nations rejoice and sing for joy, for Thou shalt judge the people righteously and govern the nations upon earth. _Then_ shall the earth yield her increase, and God, even our own God, shall bless us. God shall bless us, and all the ends of the earth shall fear Him. 

[Footnote A: With all who died in Faith, not having received thePromises, nor--according to your modern teachers--ever to receive. ]

[Footnote B: Hence to the end the text is that read in terminationof the lecture on its second delivery, only with an added word ortwo of comment on Proverbs xvii. ]

[Footnote C: 'The Conservation of Energy. ' King and Co. , 1873. ]

[Footnote D: Written under the impression that the lurid andprolonged sunsets of last autumn had been proved to be connectedwith the flight of volcanic ashes. This has been since, I hear, disproved again. Whatever their cause, those sunsets were, in thesense in which I myself use the word, altogether 'unnatural' andterrific: but they have no connection with the far more fearful, because protracted and increasing, power of the Plague-wind. Theletter from White's 'History of Selborne, ' quoted by the Rev. W. R. Andrews in his letter to the 'Times, ' (dated January 8th) seems todescribe aspects of the sky like these of 1883, just a hundredyears before, in 1783: and also some of the circumstances noted, especially the variation of the wind to all quarters withoutalteration in the air, correspond with the character of theplague-wind; but the fog of 1783 made the sun dark, withiron-colored rays--not pale, with blanching rays. I subjoin Mr. Andrews' letter, extremely valuable in its collation of the recordsof simultaneous volcanic phenomena; praying the reader also toobserve 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 somuch attention has been given to the late brilliant sunsets andsunrises, to be reminded that almost identically the sameappearances 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, andfull of horrible phenomena; for besides the alarming meteors andtremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed thedifferent counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze or smoky fogthat prevailed for many weeks in this island and in every part ofEurope, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinaryappearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By myjournal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June23d to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied toevery quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun atnoon looked as black as a clouded moon, and shed a ferruginouslight on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly luridand blood-colored at rising and setting. The country people beganto look with a superstitious awe at the red lowering aspect of thesun; and, indeed, there was reason for the most enlightened personto be apprehensive, for all the while Calabria and part of the Isleof Sicily were torn and convulsed with earthquakes, and about thatjuncture 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 greatvolcanic eruptions in and near Iceland. A submarine volcano burstforth in the sea, thirty miles southwest of Iceland, which ejectedso much pumice that the ocean was covered with this substance, tothe distance of 150 miles, and ships were considerably impeded intheir course; and a new island was formed, from which fire andsmoke and pumice were emitted. 

Besides this submarine eruption, the volcano Skaptar-Jökull, on themainland, on June 11th, 1783, threw out a torrent of lava, soimmense as to surpass in magnitude the bulk of Mont Blanc, andejected so vast an amount of fine dust, that the atmosphere overIceland continued loaded with it for months afterwards. It fell insuch quantities over parts of Caithness--a distance of 600miles--as to destroy the crops, and that year is still spoken of bythe inhabitants as the year of 'the ashie. '

These particulars are gathered from the text-books of Lyell andGeikie. 

I am not aware whether the coincidence in time of the Icelandiceruptions, and of the peculiar appearance of the sun, described byGilbert White, has yet been noticed; but this coincidence may verywell be taken as some little evidence towards explaining theconnection between the recent beautiful sunsets and the tremendousvolcanic explosion of the Isle of Krakatoa in August last. 

 W. R. ANDREWS, F. G. S. Teffont Ewyas Rectory, Salisbury, January 8th. "]]

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Pages 7 & 18: Standardized spelling of "thundercloud. "

Page 20: Standardized quotation marks surrounding poem. 

Page 22: Retained inconsistent hyphenation of "thunder-storm" inquoted material. 

Pages 26, 58 & 70: Retained inconsistent hyphenation of "billiard-ball". 

Pages 29 & 62: Standardized hyphenation of "now-a-days. "

Pages 31-68: Adjusted placement of footnotes. 

Pages 37 & 59: Standardized spelling of "hill-side. "