THE WINDS OF WINTER.

Evening Star, Issue 14631, 29 July 1911, Page 2

THE WINDS OF WINTER.

t ln the silences of the woods I have heard all day and all night The moving multitudes Of the Wind in flight. Ho -is named Myriad : And I am sad Often, and often I am glad; But often Tam white With fear of the dim broods That are Ids multitudes. This mystical poetic aspect of the wind is not common now. Wo have all become scientific. We reduce everything to chemical and mathematical terms. Wo can toll all about the wind, where it comes from, what it does, how it is produced by a rush of cold air from the Poles to the Equator, and the spin of the earth on its axis causing currents, in the atmosphere, and so on. Are not all these things known of the schoolboy ‘ and hammered out for us in the hard, dry text books of schools .and colleges. And that is well. , But it is not all—-not even tiro most important. We know all about the wind except the wind itself, even as we know all about life except life itself. That is the mystery. That is the sphinx that we question in vain. * * * « * * * The winds of winter! They have distinction about them. They have quite a different music, and march, and use, and beauty from those of summer or spring. They scatter no largesse of buds or flowers. Their grey hands are often full of snow or rain. Their voice is not a sigh, as in summer ; it is a wail, a prolonged sob, ashriek sometimes that almost wakes the dead. But “it is when the trees are loaf- “ less or when the last ■withered leaves “ rustle in the wintry air, creeping along “ the bare .boughs like tremulous mice, or “ fluttering from the branches like the tired “ and starved swallows left behind in the “ebbing tides of migration, that the secret “of the forest is most likely to be sur- “ prised. . . . Go to tlie winter woods; “ listen there, look, watch; and the dead “ months will give you a subtler secret “than any you have found in the forest. It is when the wind wanders among the stripped branches and plays its music theio that some strange, compelling spell takes hold of you. It is perhaps deepest and most arresting in a pine wood at night, or perhaps better still in a _ small orove of pino trow. Horo it has room to .move about and put forth all its magic. .And what strange, wcirri, melancholy music it evolves an it wanders at will amid the sombre branches and “each needle of the million million leaf- “ lets draws its tongue across tho organ “blast.”

I crave him grace, of summer boughs, If such an outcast bo, Who never hoard that flesbless chant Rise solemn in the tree, As if some caravan of sound On deserts in the sky, Had broken rank, 'then knit and passed In seamless company. Tho effects which the winter winds produce in different people is very marked and remarkable. It etems to have inspired Robert Burns often. Many of bis poems took flight on tho wings of tho winter wind. It is when this westlin wind blows loud and shrill that ho is ewer tho hills to Nannie 0. It is when the “loud inconstant blast” is howling that he wanders along tho “lonely banks of Ayr.” Winter was his favorite season. This was duo to some extent to his misfortunes giving a tinge of melancholy to | his mind. But not altogether. He confesses that there is something in a mighty tempest that “raises the mind to a serious “sublimity favorable to everything great “and noble.” In a note appended to ‘ Winter : A Dirge,’ Ire writes: There is scarcely any worthy object which gives me more—l do not know if 1 should call it pleasure—but something that enraptures me, something that exalts mo, than to walk on the sheltered side ol a wood, or high plantation, in a cloudy winter day and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees and raving over the plain. It's my best season for devotion ; ,my mind is wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him who, in the pompous language of the Hebrew bard, “ walks on the wings of the wind.” ******* But most people like to got inside when the wind is howling about on a winter night. But they do not escape it there. It only suggests now and strange emotions. One of Dickens's Christmas stories opens with a description of the night wind heard in a church; how it goes wandering round and round, moaning, trying with its unseen hands the windows and doors, and then, when it gets in, soaring up to tho roof, as if to rend the rafters, then flinging itself despairingly on the stones below, when it passes multoringly to the vaults. “Ugh! Heaven preserve us, sitting snugly “round the fire! It has an awful voice, “that wind, at Midnight singing in a “ church.” But it is not without its ghostly, eerie suggestions even round the snug fire at home. Hear it as it whispers and whoops in the chimney. On Die night of Duncan’s murder Lenox remarks : Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, Lamenliugs heard i’ tho air; strange screams of death, And prophesying with accents terrible. It is not difficult to find all manner of things weird and wonderful as one sits fire-gazing and listening to tho 'wind in the chimney of a winter night. “ What’n a nicht! Only hear to that luin !” exclaims tho Shepherd in an opening note of ono of tho ‘ Noetes xAmbrosurnaj,’ ;md he goes on to say that in sudi a hurricane ho could pity the moon. But Charlotte Bronte takes a different view of tho orb of night in such circumstances. In words which Swinburne declares n nothing can beat and no one can match,” she writes in ’Shirley’: “The moon rides glorious, “glad of this gale; as glad as if she gave “herself to its fierce caress with love.” How delightful it is to wake in tho night and hear the winds bunting against the house, or taking it in their arms and making it quiver with their fierce caresses, and to realise oneself, in Emerson’s happy pliraso, “ ondostd in a tumultuous privacy of .storm. ■’ When Romola was watching and waiting far into the night for the return of her traitorous husband, wo read : “ She heard the rain become heavier and “heavier. She liked to hear tho rain. “ Tho stormy heavens seemed a safeguard “ against man’s devices, compelling them | “ to inaction.” But not so did the winter | winds impress Shirley. As she “ listened i “ to certain notes of the gale, that plained ! “ like restless spirits—notes which, had I “ she not been so young, gay, and healthy, j “ would have swept her trembling nerves 1 “ like some omen, some anticipatory dirge.” And Caroline Eels tone wonders to herself “ if nothing haunts or inspires tho wind, as it comes sobbing to tho casement.” We recall, too, how Lucy Snow, tho alter ego of Charlotte Bronte herself, tries to stop her ears against the subtle and searching ! cry of the wind. She thinks how tliree “ times in tho course of my life events “ had taught me that these strange accents “ in the storms—this restless, hopeless cry “ —denote a coming state of the atmos- “ phero unpropitious to life. . . . Hence “I inferred arose tho legend of the Ban- “ sbee.” And no leader of that profound

and powerful novel will be likely to forget its impassioned finale: Peace! peace, Banshee—keenin at every window! It will rise, it will swell—it shrieks out long; wander as I may through the house tins night, I cannet lull the blast. ******* But we are hero on the shore of great mysteries. We prido ourselves on being ho longer superstitious. But it is not superstitions to recognise the limitation of knowledge, and'to admit that there may he more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. ''As wo have already said, we know all about tie wind, except the wind itself. What is it? Why should it be full of suggestions such as these? Why should it suggest anything at all? What is there in the mere movements of air that can stir the spirit’s inner deeps as it upheaves the sea? As one of the old Welsh bards says': Discover then what it is— The strong creation from before the flood. Without flesh, without bone, without head, without feet. Discover what it is. Exactly. But who can do that? Yet the attempt has been mule—will continue to be made—and among the earliest of these is that of a now forgotten race. It is curious that the Aztec word for it, “ebeeatl,” signifies alike wind, shadow, and soul. The Aztecs apparently believed that the three were all one and the same. So did the ancient Jews. With them the same word, which meant breath, air, stood for spirit also. And in their literature one may trace the evolution of the thought from its physical basis to its metaphysical, from the material air to its culmination in the third person of the Trinity. A Jewish historian records that Saul suffered from hypochondria, and that the Jews gave this the name' of bad air, which the Bible translates “evil spirit,” for they held, he says, that “ the devil inhabited the air.” It is perhaps an echo of this that we hear in St. Paul’s words regarding “hosts of spiritual wickednesses in high places ” —i.e,. we presume, the loftier rcgkrasof the atmosphere. Of course in our superior way we smile at all this. The scientific temper of our time derides the idea of air having a spiritual basis or being the medium of spirit. It calls this superstition, and to have a superstition is for many worse than to have a shrunken soul. Says that strange, mystic genius William Sharp, speaking of the old Celtic insight into Nature: “I do not believe in “ spells and charms and foolish incanta- “ tions, but I think that ancient wisdom “ out of the simple and primitive heart of “an olden time is not an ill heritage. And “if to believe in the power of the spirit “ is to be superstitious, I am well content “to be of the company that is now forsaken.” fr •3f # Of

But whether wind is spirit or spirit wind, as those ancients believed, wo are at Jeast convinced that stagnant air is provocative of all kinds of disorders—disorders not merely emotional, but physical as well. And stagnant air is air out of the control of wind. And so the winter winds sow health abroad. They may shako the dead leaves from the trees and strip the branches bare. But what then? We look up, and Dear God, The heavens, how fathomless and broad! This larger, loftier vision wo could not see when summer wove its veils throughout the forest and the sky was invisible through the thick-set foliage. But winter comes and whips and scourges bare the trees, and we get again the vision winch the bird beholds as it loans far off upon the viewless wind. And that is a parable of life. Perpetual summer would destroy it. We think it would be well to be lapt always in soft Lydian airs, and to know no winds that were harsher than the feet of a fawn or the wings of a dove. But all history testifies that without energies and overthrows human nature corrupts, as it corrupts in slirlcss, stagnant air. It would be as life from the dead to many men and women to have a stern winter come into their existence—a winter whoso storms would strip away the smothering luxuries that hide from them the heavens above? “You have a lino air here,” said a man to a miner on the Cornish coast. “Yes, sir. “You see, it cornea blown over leagues of “ the Atlantic, sifted by its storms, and “cleansed by its ocean breath.” It is good to live where one breathes air like that. W umow me through with Ihy keen, clear breath. Wind with the tang of the sea. Speed through the closing gates of the day, Find mo and fold me and have tbv wav, And take thy will of me. .' . ’ Batter the closed doors of my heart, And set my spirit free! For I Stifle here in this crowded price, Sick for the teuantless fields of space, Wind with the tang of the sea.