is based upon the contest of the Polar and Equatorial strains of
that tyrannous race. The West Wind is the greatest king. The East
rules between the Tropics. They have shared each ocean between
them. Each has his genius of supreme rule. The King of the West
never intrudes upon the recognised dominion of his kingly brother.
He is a barbarian, of a northern type. Violent without craftiness,
and furious without malice, one may imagine him seated masterfully
with a double-edged sword on his knees upon the painted and gilt
clouds of the sunset, bowing his shock head of golden locks, a
flaming beard over his breast, imposing, colossal, mighty-limbed,
with a thundering voice, distended cheeks and fierce blue eyes,
urging the speed of his gales. The other, the East king, the king
of blood-red sunrises, I represent to myself as a spare Southerner
with clear-cut features, black-browed and dark-eyed, gray-robed,
upright in sunshine, resting a smooth-shaven cheek in the palm of
his hand, impenetrable, secret, full of wiles, fine-drawn, keen--
meditating aggressions.

The West Wind keeps faith with his brother, the King of the
Easterly weather. "What we have divided we have divided," he seems
to say in his gruff voice, this ruler without guile, who hurls as
if in sport enormous masses of cloud across the sky, and flings the
great waves of the Atlantic clear across from the shores of the New
World upon the hoary headlands of Old Europe, which harbours more
kings and rulers upon its seamed and furrowed body than all the
oceans of the world together. "What we have divided we have
divided; and if no rest and peace in this world have fallen to my
share, leave me alone. Let me play at quoits with cyclonic gales,
flinging the discs of spinning cloud and whirling air from one end
of my dismal kingdom to the other: over the Great Banks or along