stance,
flocked into the towns.

But winter was coming, and with winter, hope. In August, the plague had
appeared in the country of England, and during September it made its
ravages. Towards the end of October it dwindled away, and was in some
degree replaced by a typhus, of hardly less virulence. The autumn was warm
and rainy: the infirm and sickly died off--happier they: many young
people flushed with health and prosperity, made pale by wasting malady,
became the inhabitants of the grave. The crop had failed, the bad corn, and
want of foreign wines, added vigour to disease. Before Christmas half
England was under water. The storms of the last winter were renewed; but
the diminished shipping of this year caused us to feel less the tempests of
the sea. The flood and storms did more harm to continental Europe than to
us--giving, as it were, the last blow to the calamities which destroyed
it. In Italy the rivers were unwatched by the diminished peasantry; and,
like wild beasts from their lair when the hunters and dogs are afar, did
Tiber, Arno, and Po, rush upon and destroy the fertility of the plains.
Whole villages were carried away. Rome, and Florence, and Pisa were
overflowed, and their marble palaces, late mirrored in tranquil streams,
had their foundations shaken by their winter-gifted power. In Germany and
Russia the injury was still more momentous.

But frost would come at last, and with it a renewal of our lease of earth.
Frost would blunt the arrows of pestilence, and enchain the furious
elements; and the land would in spring throw off her garment of snow,
released from her menace of destruction. It was not until February that the
desired signs of winter appeared. For three days the snow fell, ice stopped
the current of the rivers, and the birds flew out from crackling branches
of the frost-whitened trees. On the fourth morning all vanished. A
south-west wind brought up rain--the sun came out, and mocking the usual
laws of nature, seemed even at this early season to burn with solsticial
force. It was no consolation, that with the first winds of March the lanes
were filled with violets, the fruit trees covered with blossoms, that the
corn sprung up, and the leaves came out, forced by the unseasonable heat.
We feared the balmy air--we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered
earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no
longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land s