And the rhyme at one time really exercised a spell. You find it used by lovers amongst our Elizabethan dramatists, who so faithfully reflected the spirit of the day. Thus, in Webster's Duchess of Malfy, Ferdinand cries to the duchess about her lover:
"Let not the sun
Shine on him till he's dead."
Act iii. Sc. 2
But the poor possess an abundance of such expressions. And as life is real to them, so their sayings are quickened with reality. Thus, "to be born in a frost" is in Yorkshire an euphemism for being foolish. In the same county, "to obtain anything under the wind" means to obtain it secretly. In Norfolk the ploughman says "there is a good steward when the wind-frost blows." Just consider, too, the richness of their vocabulary of weather-terms, and the observation which it implies. Take Yorkshire alone, and there we shall find "dag," "douk," "pell," "pelse," "rouk," "rag," "sops," all standing for different kinds and degrees of rain and showers. There the white winter-mist is the "hag" the hoar-frost the "rind," the snow-flakes "clarts of snow," and the summer heat-mist the "gossamer," as Wedgwood [{216}] notices, the Marien fäden of Germany. Go into the eastern counties, and the dialect is as rich. The sea-mist is the "sea-fret" and the "sea-roke." The heavy rain, which soaks into the earth, is the "ground-rain." The light rain is the "smur" in Suffolk, the "brange" in Essex, and the "dag" in Norfolk, from which last word the various corruptions "water-dogs" and "sun-dogs" are formed.
Passing, however, from words, let us note a few of the weather-rhymes and weather-proverbs which show what accurate observers necessity has made our peasants. There is not a village where the local phenomena of mists and clouds are not preserved in some rhyme. From Cumberland to Devonshire the land echoes with these weather-saws. In the former county we have—
"If Skiddaw hath a cap,
Criffel wots full well of that."
In the latter, the rhyme—this time really a rhyme—runs:
"When Haldon wears a hat,
Let Kenton beware of a skat."
The Warwickshire and Worcestershire peasants in the Vale of Evesham repeat a similar couplet about their own Bredon, and the Leicestershire and Lincolnshire churls about their Belvoir. Weather-rhymes lie treasured up throughout the midland counties about
"The green-blue mackerel sky,
Never holds three days dry;"
in the northern counties about "mony haws, mony snaws," and in the eastern of the "near bur, rain fur."' In England we, too, can rhyme about la journée du pèlerin. For centuries the village poet has sung of "mare's tails" and "hen-scrattins," and the great "Noah's Ark cloud," and the "weather-head," of the changes of the moon, how