I hear an angry wind at night, first tongued by the distant trees. Rising close to the edge of the river, the copse catches the least breath of the west, transmitting its voice through the trees. Each tree thus becomes a harp or viol played upon by the air in motion, producing a varied music according to the character of its spray. How different the sound of the summer wind! the whispering and rustling of trillions of living leaves; one might distinguish the season by the sense of hearing alone. Now that vegetation is devoid of foliage, there is so much less to obstruct the current of the air brought pure and undefiled from the Western plains. This air, additionally sifted and clarified by its passage through countless woods and primeval forests, I inhale in full draughts within my comfortable room. Gathered by the cold air-boxes, this oxygen and nitrogen is tempered and warmed by a single pound of steam below, before rising fresh and delicious through the registers above. Thus even in midwinter do I receive the essence of the meadows and the woods.
Not less comfort and delight do I owe to glass than to coal. It retains the heat and excludes the frost. Scarcely the space of a foot separates my easy chair and summer warmth from falling flakes and wintry cold. It lets in the balm of the sky and the grace of the leafless trees; it serves to simulate summer. Transparent to light and to outward forms, glass is merely translucent to sounds. I look out and see the trees rock and toss beneath the gale; I listen, and hear the wind rejoicing in his strength. Light and sunshine stream through my window-pane as though it were a part of the atmosphere. It is almost like the atmosphere—transparent, invisible, inodorous. No material used in the construction of the house imparts such an air of richness from without as polished plate-glass. Is it not equally desirable within, to look out through? Let the carpets, if necessary, have less depth of pile; but let in the landscape and the light as clearly as we may. To look at exterior objects through vitreous waves is to cheat the sight and rob pleasant surroundings of their charm.
Again, the glass that brings the landscape into my room shuts out the external world as readily as it lets it in—in the form of stained glass it passes from transparent to translucent, but still retains its life through color. I would have in my hall above the landing a wheel-window of ancient stained glass to render daylight doubly beautiful and refined—a flood of violet like that concentrated and diffused by the windows of the tall clere-story of Tours. But the gorgeous stained glass of mediæval days, such as still blazes in the old cathedrals, is an art of the past, and my ship contained it not amid her precious stores.
Yet once more is glass transformed, and from transparent and translucent is changed to opaque—opaque, yet not opaque. Neither clear nor colored, it possesses still more life in this its other form. For my mirrors not only receive light and color, but stamp them indelibly upon their surface. Placed in certain positions, they even enable me to see through opaque surfaces. By a glance into the hall through the door of the room where I sit I may discern what transpires in the adjoining room, though divided from it by a solid wall. Without my mirrors I could not even recognize my outward self. They double the objects in my house; they double the number of my guests; they possess a double life. They take the place of a Daubigny, for do they not reflect the Daubigny? And lovely woman, how could she look so sweet without her second self—her mirror!
The primroses in my garden are harbingers of spring; the primrose band in the south was the precursor of storm. All night the wind raved, bringing snow and still more wind with returning day. The weather-cock creaks ominously in its socket, pointing alternately west and northwest. I note a drop of twenty degrees in the temperature, and hereafter I shall distrust the primrose band.
Again the strange light in the south, shining brightly throughout the afternoon. This band appears most vividly through a vista of the grounds which focuses a distant slope crowned with deciduous trees and isolated pines. I notice it, at times, during late autumn and early spring, or on mild winter days when the moisture of the atmosphere may be perceptibly felt. The weather-vane always points to it, though no air be stirring—indeed, it only occurs during a calm. Glowing through the skeleton trees, a lustrous primrose or lively crocus, it illumines and transfigures the entire horizon of the south, as if inviting to follow it to a blander clime. It seems almost more beautiful than sunlight; it is colored sunlight screened from glare. When I attempt to trace it to the range of the southern hills it keeps receding to the hills and trees beyond—always present, ever out of reach. An observer standing there, in turn, would see it farther on, and these farther hills and trees would yield its luminousness to the landscape more southward still.
Is it typical of life—man grasping at an object only to see it disappear, seizing a pleasure to find it evanescent, relinquishing a hope for one yet more ephemeral; ever reaching for happiness to meet with disappointment at the goal?
Whence its origin? in what distant sky does it first appear? The swift wings of the hawk might trace it to its source; for me it is intangible. Doubtless with a word the meteorologists would dispel the charm it holds. I prefer to regard it as an occult force, a mysterious weather-sign to flash upon the wintry gloom and foretell the coming storm. In the present instance it brought yet more moisture, and was succeeded the following day by fog and driving mist, changing in the evening to sudden cold and wind.
A windy moonlight night, with clouds chasing each other like crests of advancing waves. The moon rides high in the west; the strong wind sweeps from the west. Æolus and all his retinue are abroad. The hillside trees toss and boom like the sea—it is high tide in the air. The air becomes a sea, the clouds its surge, the trees the shingle upon which it beats. It fascinates like the sea! When the moon appears between the rifts it seems stationary; when partly concealed under a white cloud, it appears coursing rapidly westward, while the clouds seem traveling slowly eastward. The moon then becomes the voyager, and the squadrons of the sky the loiterers. Its luminousness is but slightly masked by the silver clouds, their translucency making them seemingly a source of light. Every now and then it disappears beneath a mass of inky breakers, gilding their outer crests ere taking its sudden plunge; it looks as if it were dropping from the sky. Almost immediately it reappears, so fast the clouds are moving. Anon it dips beneath a snowy surge, to re-emerge and sink below a Cimmerian roller, just as a swimmer dives into and is lost in the surf. Meanwhile, the wind roars like an angry sea. This glory of the wintry night my glass brings into my room. But the silver lining and life of the moonlit clouds can not be traced in written words, nor the varied voices of the wind be rendered into musical bars. The moon and the sun shine so that all may see. The wind blows so that all may hear.
I hear a new creak in my neighbor’s weather-vane amid the moaning of the wind; or is it the repeated far-off blowing of a horn? Twice on my going to the door the sound suddenly ceases, to continue fitfully on my return. I discover it is produced merely by the side-light above my writing-table. Do we not thus frequently attribute ulterior motives to causes which exist only in imagination, or whose source originates with ourselves? Often is the humming in our ear.