"Oh! that spoils the poetry of it!" Carl exclaimed involuntarily. "Pardon me! but to speak of God is to remind me of long, sanctimonious faces and disagreeable ways, and of a frowning on everything graceful and grand and beautiful."
"It isn't right!" she said eagerly, forgetting herself; "for it is God who has made everything grand and beautiful and graceful. When you see a fine picture, or a piece of statuary, or read a good book, you think of the artist, and admire him. Reading a play, the other day, you said, 'What a soul Shakespeare had!' and I heard you say once that Michael Angelo was a god; and last night, when Melicent played a sonata you liked, you exclaimed, 'That glorious Beethoven!' Why not say, 'That great God!' when you see the northern lights? Besides, God made Beethoven, and Michael Angelo, and Shakespeare, and taught them everything they knew. I do really think, Carl, that the truth is more beautiful than any legend. Why isn't it as fine to say, 'The God of glory thundereth,' as to talk about Jove throwing thunderbolts? I don't see anything very admirable in Jove. And why isn't it as sublime for the sun to hang and shine, and the world to go whirling about it, because God told them to, as for Phœbus to drive the chariot of the sun up the East?"
She turned her face, rosy with earnestness and northern lights, and looked at him with her shining eyes.
"Why, Edith," he said, "you're going to be a poet!"
She shook her head, and hung it a little bashfully. "No, I am not. But King David was a poet."
And so the matter dropped. But Edith had spoken her word for God, and may be it had not been entirely lost.
Perhaps we may be allowed here to say a word in defence of the weather as a subject of conversation. The assertion that Americans, and especially New Englanders, commence all acquaintanceships and all social conversations with an atmospheric exordium, has become classical, and to mention that on any given occasion the weather was the subject of conversation is to intend to be facetious. But let us question the good sense of this mockery. Are not the countless phases of the many-sided weather as noble, as beautiful, as profitable, and as harmless topics of conversation as ninety-nine out of a hundred things which people do talk about? Is a dull or a wicked speech, a dull or a wicked book, a fashion, a horse, your neighbor's character, a caucus, a candidate, even a song, or a bit of weather on canvas, a finer topic?
Ah, the weather!—skies of infinite changes, inexhaustible palette in which the painter's imagination dips its brush; calms, nature holding her breath; winds, the nearest to spirit of any created thing; clouds, the aerial chemists of light; showers, overflowing spray from fountains suspended in air; rains, the asperges of the skies; fogs, filmy veils which all the king's men cannot tear aside; droughts, continents in a fever; cold, the horror of nature, at which the small streams stiffen and die, the mountains whiten to ghosts, and even iron shrinks; heat, nature's angel of the resurrection blowing through the golden sunshine, and calling the flowers out of their graves, and bringing the birds from afar—would that all the bad, the uncharitable, the silly, the cold, the complaining talk that on this earth vexes the ear of heaven could be changed to sweet and harmless talk of the infinitely-varying weather, and of him who planned its variety!
After this protest and aspiration, it can be said of the Yorkes, without any intention of reflecting on their intelligence, that the weather had a good deal to do with their entertainment, from the spring round through the circle of flowers and snows, till beside the melting drift they found the first May-flowers making their rosy act of faith in the coming summer.