Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's History

by Allen Howard Godbey

Hark! was that the sea-shell of Triton? Neptune approaches with his Naiad train. You may see the plunge of his dolphin steeds. And see! what vision of incomparable loveliness is that? It is Aphrodite, goddess of love—sprung from the foam of the sea—as fragile as the fleecy mass from whence she came; as inconstant as the tossing wave on which she dances. How can love be otherwise, since she is its queen? In the sky above you see the beautiful Andromeda with the radiant Perseus. There Hercules yet wields his club and wears his lion-skin. And there—

It is vanished. The disenchantment is complete. Modern civilization has replaced the nymph with the peasant, and the faun with the brigand. The pipe of Pan is forever silent. Marsyas is revenged, for Apollo is no more. Jupiter dethroned Saturn; Jupiter has long since been dethroned. Where are the hands that penned those beauteous fancies; the bards that sung the deeds of the gods? Dust and ashes these two thousand years.

Their works live after them. Passing centuries have not improved upon their lovely phantasies: it may be because they could not. Rome has named the months of our year: Norway has aided to name the days of our week. Easter preserves the name of Œstara, Teuton goddess of springtime, of new life, new light. So the names of the winds remain. Auster, the south wind, has his memorial in Australia. Zephyr, the gentle west wind, is still a theme for poet’s song. Rude Boreas, “blustering railer,” will always find a home in the north. Civilization has not driven him from his domain. Æolus, the master spirit, most powerful because most delicate and beautiful, still stirs our wind-harps with his breath. The spirits of the air are as boisterous and untamed as in the days of Æneas.

And what figures would appeal more strongly to the imagination than these simple personifications? How can too great importance be attached to the part the winds perform in the economy of nature? Without them the land would become a Sahara; the seas would be covered with a London fog. In the rustle of the breeze, as well as in the roar of hurricane, there is purpose and energy. The hand that guides one, controls the other. “He holdeth the wind in his fists.”

In every age man’s imagination has been strongly influenced by the mysterious or unknown. There is little play for poetic sentiment in the cold practicality of science. That which is clearly comprehended, loses half its charm. The botanist carefully plucks to pieces a flower; it is analyzed, and all its mechanism understood—but it is no longer a flower. The alchemist has produced the wonderful science of chemistry; but the philosopher’s stone and the secret of producing gold are forever numbered among the shadowy myths of the past. The explorer has roamed in countless climes amid a myriad perils: a thousand treasures has he given to the world: but his El Dorado and the Fountain of Perpetual Youth have become as a dream in the night. And thus for aye will phantoms vanish as we grasp. Truth bears a magic wand at whose touch the unreal dies as a snowflake in a flame. All time has borne its legends of the risen departed, whose spirits roam the earth by night; but we have not proved that the dead have done in six thousand years so much evil as the living in a single day.

So one by one our cherished fables disappear. The steam-engine seems a thing of life; but we do not find a hidden geni therein. Electricity, one of the youngest of man’s practical discoveries, has become the most easily controlled. The bolts of Jove are the prisoners of man. The river is harnessed to the mill and factory. But the winds roam as free as in the day of creation “when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” Of all the forces of nature the wind and sea are least beneath control of man. The command “Subdue and have dominion” has not yet been fully obeyed.

Small wonder, then, that a glamour of mysticism remains about the storm and its birth. Man finds himself in the presence of a power beyond his comprehension. Of the various elements of nature, the wind, the sea and the storm are more than ever the realm of fancy and awe. One often wonders at many other ancient myths; but there seems nothing surprising in the Grecian fancy that the winds were the spirit slaves of Æolus; or in the Arabian thought, that storms were but the battles of wonderful genii, whose weapons were fire, water, and their own powerful breath. In the crash of the thunder the Arab heard their terrible strokes. The Northman beheld giants, contending now with each other, now with the giants of frost or of fire; now resting a moment in their cavern home—now chasing the clouds like frightened sheep from their realm of Mistheim. Some day all these powers would be arrayed in battle with the gods themselves, and Ragnarok, or universal chaos would follow. God made man in his own image; man has ever since endeavored to make all things in his own. So have the winds become personified in every age and land.

Charles Kingsley has given us a beautiful picture of the “air mothers,” and the part they play in the realm of nature. Compare the ancient with the modern. We now know the laws and the work of the winds; but we have not found a better manner of picturing them. They are still the beautiful spirits of the air; the Peris of the upper deep, thoughtless in life, weeping repentant tears in the hour of their death.

“Who are these who follow us softly over the moor in the autumn evening? Their wings brush and rustle in the fir boughs, and they whisper before and behind us, as if they called gently to each other, like birds flocking homeward to their nests.

“The woodpecker on the pine stems knows them, and laughs aloud for joy as they pass. The rooks above the pasture know them, and wheel around and tumble in their play.