phase of his passion, a fury bejewelled with stars, mayhap bearing
the crescent of the moon on its brow, shaking the last vestiges of
its torn cloud-mantle in inky-black squalls, with hail and sleet
descending like showers of crystals and pearls, bounding off the
spars, drumming on the sails, pattering on the oilskin coats,
whitening the decks of homeward-bound ships. Faint, ruddy flashes
of lightning flicker in the starlight upon her mastheads. A chilly
blast hums in the taut rigging, causing the ship to tremble to her
very keel, and the soaked men on her decks to shiver in their wet
clothes to the very marrow of their bones. Before one squall has
flown over to sink in the eastern board, the edge of another peeps
up already above the western horizon, racing up swift, shapeless,
like a black bag full of frozen water ready to burst over your
devoted head. The temper of the ruler of the ocean has changed.
Each gust of the clouded mood that seemed warmed by the heat of a
heart flaming with anger has its counterpart in the chilly blasts
that seem blown from a breast turned to ice with a sudden revulsion
of feeling. Instead of blinding your eyes and crushing your soul
with a terrible apparatus of cloud and mists and seas and rain, the
King of the West turns his power to contemptuous pelting of your
back with icicles, to making your weary eyes water as if in grief,
and your worn-out carcass quake pitifully. But each mood of the
great autocrat has its own greatness, and each is hard to bear.
Only the north-west phase of that mighty display is not
demoralizing to the same extent, because between the hail and sleet
squalls of a north-westerly gale one can see a long way ahead.

To see! to see!--this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest
of blind humanity. To have his path made clear for him is the
aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous