by the drought.

When Mr. Fields's "Village Dogmatist" was asked what caused the rain,
or the fog, he leaned upon his cane and answered, with an air of
profound wisdom, that "when the atmosphere and hemisphere come together
it causes the earth to sweat, and thereby produces the rain,"--or the
fog, as the case may be. The explanation is a little vague, as his
biographer suggests, but it is picturesque, and there can be little
doubt that two somethings do come in contact that produce a sweating
when it rains or is foggy. More than that, the philosophy is simple and
comprehensive, which Goethe said was the main matter in such things.
Goethe's explanation is still more picturesque, but I doubt if it is a
bit better philosophy. "I compare the earth and her atmosphere," he
said to Eckermann, "to a great living being perpetually inhaling and
exhaling. If she inhale she draws the atmosphere to her, so that,
coming near her surface, it is condensed to clouds and rain. This state
I call water-affirmative." The opposite state, when the earth exhales
and sends the watery vapors upward so that they are dissipated through
the whole space of the higher atmosphere, he called "water-negative."

This is good literature, and worthy the great poet; the science of it I
would not be so willing to vouch for.

The poets, more perhaps than the scientists, have illustrated and held
by the great law of alternation, of ebb and flow, of turn and return,
in nature. An equilibrium, or, what is the same thing, a straight line,
Nature abhors more than she does a vacuum. If the moisture of the air
were uniform, or the heat uniform, that is, _in equilibrio,_ how could
it rain? what would turn the scale? But these things are heaped up, are
in waves. There is always a preponderance one way or the other; always
"a steep inequality." Down this incline the rain comes, and up the
other side it goes. The high barometer travels like the crest of a sea,
and the low barometer like the trough. When the scale kicks the beam in
one place, it is correspondingly depressed in some other. When the east
is burning up, the west is generally drowning out. The weather, we say,
is always in extremes; it never rains but it pours: but this is only
the abuse of a law on the part of the elements which is at the bottom
of all the life and motion on the globe.

The rain itself comes in shorter or longer waves,--now fast, now
slow--and sometimes in regular throbs or pulse-beats.