nd how the maddened
heaven howls back her frenzy! Two dreadful maniacs raging apart, but in
communion, in one vast bedlam! The drift-snow spins before the
hurricane, hissing like a nest of serpents let loose to torment the air.
What fierce flakes! furies! as if all the wasps that ever stung had been
revivified, and were now careering part and parcel of the tempest. We
are in a Highland Hut in the midst of mountains. But no land is to be
seen any more than if we were in the middle of the sea. Yet a wan glare
shows that the snow-storm is strangely shadowed by superincumbent
cliffs; and though you cannot see, you _hear_ the mountains. Rendings
are going on, frequent, over your head--and all around the blind
wilderness--the thunderous tumblings down of avalanches, mixed with the
moanings, shriekings, and yellings of caves, as if spirits there were
angry with the snow-drift choking up the fissures and chasms in the
cliffs. Is that the creaking and groaning, and rooking and tossing of
old trees, afraid of being uprooted and flung into the spate?

"Red comes the river down, and loud and oft
The angry spirit of the water shrieks,"

more fearful than at midnight in this night-like day--whose meridian is
a total sun eclipse. The river runs by, blood-like, through the
snow--and, short as is the reach you can see through the flaky gloom,
that short reach shows that all his course must be terrible--more and
more terrible--as, gathering his streams like a chieftain his clan--ere
long he will sweep shieling, and hut, and hamlet to the sea, undermining
rocks, cutting mounds asunder, and blowing up bridges that explode into
the air with a roar like that of cannon. You sometimes think you hear
thunder, though you know that cannot be--but sublimer than thunder is
the nameless noise so like that of agonised life--that eddies far and
wide around--high and huge above--fear all the while being at the bottom
of your heart--an objectless, dim, dreary, undefinable fear, whose
troubled presence--if any mortal feeling be so--is sublime. Your
imagination is troubled, and dreams of death, but of no single corpse,
of no single grave. Nor fear you for yourself--for the Hut in which you
thus enjoy the storm is safer than the canopied cliff-calm of the
eagle's nest; but your spirit is convulsed from its deepest and darkest
foundations, and all that lay hidden there of the wild and wonderful,
the pitiful and the strange, the terrible and patheti