ager expectation and passionate love, and shower
them in double portion on thy dear head. Advance! avail thyself of the
gift, thou and thy comrades; and in the drama you are about to act, do not
disgrace those who taught you to enter on the stage, and to pronounce
becomingly the parts assigned to you! May your progress be uninterrupted
and secure; born during the spring-tide of the hopes of man, may you lead
up the summer to which no winter may succeed!

[1] See an ingenious Essay, entitled, "The Mythological Astronomy of the
Ancients Demonstrated," by Mackey, a shoemaker, of Norwich printed in 1822.
[2] Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution.

CHAPTER V.

SOME disorder had surely crept into the course of the elements, destroying
their benignant influence. The wind, prince of air, raged through his
kingdom, lashing the sea into fury, and subduing the rebel earth into some
sort of obedience.

The God sends down his angry plagues from high,
Famine and pestilence in heaps they die.
Again in vengeance of his wrath he falls
On their great hosts, and breaks their tottering walls;
Arrests their navies on the ocean's plain,
And whelms their strength with mountains of the main.

Their deadly power shook the flourishing countries of the south, and
during winter, even, we, in our northern retreat, began to quake under
their ill effects.

That fable is unjust, which gives the superiority to the sun over the wind.
Who has not seen the lightsome earth, the balmy atmosphere, and basking
nature become dark, cold and ungenial, when the sleeping wind has awoke in
the east? Or, when the dun clouds thickly veil the sky, while exhaustless
stores of rain are poured down, until, the dank earth refusing to imbibe
the superabundant moisture, it lies in pools on the surface; when the torch
of day seems like a meteor, to be quenched; who has not seen the
cloud-stirring north arise, the streaked blue appear, and soon an opening
made in the vapours in the eye of the wind, through which the bright azure
shines? The clouds become thin; an arch is formed for ever rising upwards,
till, the universal cope being unveiled, the sun pours forth its rays,
re-animated and fed by the breeze.

Then mighty art thou, O wind, to be throned above all other vicegerents of
nature's power; whether thou comest destroying from the east, or pregnant
with elementary life from the west; thee the clouds obey; the sun is
subservient to thee