making a diadem for his brow. Then the seamen, attentive courtiers
of the weather, think of regulating the conduct of their ships by
the mood of the master. The West Wind is too great a king to be a
dissembler: he is no calculator plotting deep schemes in a sombre
heart; he is too strong for small artifices; there is passion in
all his moods, even in the soft mood of his serene days, in the
grace of his blue sky whose immense and unfathomable tenderness
reflected in the mirror of the sea embraces, possesses, lulls to
sleep the ships with white sails. He is all things to all oceans;
he is like a poet seated upon a throne--magnificent, simple,
barbarous, pensive, generous, impulsive, changeable, unfathomable--
but when you understand him, always the same. Some of his sunsets
are like pageants devised for the delight of the multitude, when
all the gems of the royal treasure-house are displayed above the
sea. Others are like the opening of his royal confidence, tinged
with thoughts of sadness and compassion in a melancholy splendour
meditating upon the short-lived peace of the waters. And I have
seen him put the pent-up anger of his heart into the aspect of the
inaccessible sun, and cause it to glare fiercely like the eye of an
implacable autocrat out of a pale and frightened sky.

He is the war-lord who sends his battalions of Atlantic rollers to
the assault of our seaboard. The compelling voice of the West Wind
musters up to his service all the might of the ocean. At the
bidding of the West Wind there arises a great commotion in the sky
above these Islands, and a great rush of waters falls upon our
shores. The sky of the westerly weather is full of flying clouds,
of great big white clouds coming thicker and thicker till they seem
to stand welded into a solid canopy, upon whose gray face the lower
wrack of the gale, thin, black and angry-looking, flies past with