What in the name of goodness makes us suppose that a mean, and miserable November day, even while we are thus Rhapsodising, is drizzling all Edinburgh with the worst of all imaginable Scottish mists—an Easterly Haur? We know that he infests all the year, but shows his poor spite in its bleakest bitterness in March and in November. Earth and heaven are not only not worth looking at in an Easterly Haur, but the Visible is absolute wretchedness, and people wonder why they were born. The visitation begins with a sort of characterless haze, waxing more and more wetly obscure, till you know not whether it be rain, snow, or sleet, that drenches your clothes in dampness, till you feel it in your skin, then in your flesh, then in your bones, then in your marrow, and then in your mind. Your blinking eyes have it too—and so, shut it as you will, has your moping mouth. Yet the streets, though looking blue, are not puddled, and the dead cat lies dry in the gutter. There is no eavesdropping—no gushing of waterspouts. To say it rained would be no breach of veracity, but a mere misstatement of a melancholy fact. The truth is, that the weather cannot rain, but keeps spit, spit, spitting, in a style sufficient to irritate Socrates—or even Moses himself; and yet true, veritable, sincere, genuine, and authentic Rain could not—or if he could would not—so thoroughly soak you and your whole wardrobe, were you to allow him a day to do it, as that shabby imitation of a tenth-rate shower, in about the time of a usual sized sermon. So much cold and so much wet, with so little to show for it, is a disgrace to the atmosphere, which it will take weeks of the sunniest the weather can afford to wipe off. But the stores of sunniness which it is in the power of Winter in this northern latitude to accumulate, cannot be immense; and therefore we verily believe that it would be too much to expect that it ever can make amends for the hideous horrors of this Easterly Haur. The Cut-throat!
On such days suicides rush to judgment. That sin is mysterious as insanity—their graves are unintelligible as the cells in Bedlam. Oh! the brain and the heart of man! Therein is the only Hell. Small these regions in space, and of narrow room—but haunted may they be with all the Fiends and all the Furies. A few nerves transmit to the soul despair or bliss. At the touch of something—whence and wherefore sent, who can say—something that serenes or troubles, soothes or jars—she soars up into life and light, just as you may have seen a dove suddenly cleave the sunshine—or down she dives into death and darkness, like a shot eagle tumbling into the sea!
Materialism! Immaterialism! Why should mortals, whom conscience tells that they are immortals, bewildered and bewildering ponder upon the dust! Do your duty to God and man, and fear not that, when that dust dies, the spirit that breathed by it will live for ever. Feels not that spirit its immortality in each sacred thought? When did ever religious soul fear annihilation? Or shudder to think that, having once known, it could ever forget God? Such forgetfulness is in the idea of eternal death. Therefore is eternal death impossible to us who can hold communion with our Maker. Our knowledge of Him—dim and remote though it be—is a God-given pledge that He will redeem us from the doom of the grave.
Let us then, and all our friends, believe, with Coleridge, in his beautiful poem of the "Nightingale," that
"In Nature there is nothing melancholy,"
not even November. The disease of the body may cause disease in the soul; yet not the less trust we in the mercy of the merciful—not the less strive we to keep feeding and trimming that spiritual lamp which is within us, even when it flickers feebly in the dampy gloom, like an earthly lamp left in a vaulted sepulchre, about to die among the dead. Heaven seems to have placed a power in our Will as mighty as it is mysterious. Call it not Liberty, lest you should wax proud; call it not Necessity, lest you should despair. But turn from the oracles of man—still dim even in their clearest responses—to the Oracles of God, which are never dark; or if so, but
"Dark with excessive bright"
to eyes not constantly accustomed to sustain the splendour. Bury all your books, when you feel the night of scepticism gathering around you—bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to illuminate the unfathomable—open your Bible, and all the spiritual world will be as bright as day.
The disease of the body may cause disease to the soul. Ay, madness. Some rapture in the soul makes the brain numb, and thence sudden or lingering death;—some rupture in the brain makes the soul insane, and thence life worse than death, and haunted by horrors beyond what is dreamt of the grave and all its corruption. Perhaps the line fullest of meaning that ever was written, is—
"Mens sana in corpore sano."