What appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid a shimmer of self-
question, is that any one coming to London in the beginning of April,
after devious delays in the South and West of England, is destined to
have printed upon his mental films a succession of meteorological
changes quite past computation. Yet if one were as willing to be honest
as one is willing to be graphic, one would allow that probably the
weather on the other side of the Atlantic was then behaving with quite
as swift and reckless caprice. The difference is that at home, having
one's proper business, one leaves the weather to look after its own
affairs in its own way; but being cast upon the necessary idleness of
sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes censorious. If I were to
be a little honester still, I should confess that I do not know of any
place where the month of April can be meaner, more _poison_, upon
occasion, than in New York. Of course it has its moments of relenting,
of showing that warm, soft, winning phase which is the reverse of its
obverse shrewishness, when the heart melts to it in a grateful
tenderness for the wide, high, blue sky, the flood of white light, the
joy of the flocking birds, and the transport of the buds which you can
all but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a sudden glut of
delight, a great, wholesale emotion of pure joy, filling the soul to
overflowing, which the more scrupulously adjusted meteorology of England
is incapable of at least so instantly imparting. Our weather is of
public largeness and universal application, and is perhaps rather for
the greatest good of the greatest number; admirable for the seed-time
and harvest, and for the growing crops in the seasons between. The
English weather is of a more private quality, and apportioned to the
personal preference, or the personal endurance. It is as if it were
influenced by the same genius which operates the whole of English life,
and allows each to identify himself as the object of specific care,