friendship. But a great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is
the strength of good-fellowship; and even doing battle with it is
something worthy and well chosen. If there is cruelty in the sea, and
terror in high places, and malice lurking in profound darkness, there is
no one of these qualities in the wind, but only power. Here is strength
too full for such negations as cruelty, as malice, or as fear; and that
strength in a solemn manner proves and tests health in our own souls.
For with terror (of the sort I mean--terror of the abyss or panic at
remembered pain, and in general, a losing grip of the succours of the
mind), and with malice, and with cruelty, and with all the forms of that
Evil which lies in wait for men, there is the savour of disease. It is
an error to think of such things as power set up in equality against
justice and right living. We were not made for them, but rather for
influences large and soundly poised; we are not subject to them but to
other powers that can always enliven and relieve. It is health in us, I
say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of
whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test
indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out,
riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at
the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is
as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of
innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity,
playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of
high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and
we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us
with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just
pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest.

It is pretended sometimes (less often perhaps now than a dozen years
ago) that certain ancient pursuits congenial to man will be lost to him