f life,
When nursed by careless Solitude I lived,
And sung of Nature with unceasing joy,
Pleased have I wander'd through your rough domain;
Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure;
Heard the winds roar, and the big torrents burst;
Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew'd
In the grim evening sky. Thus passed the time,
Till through the lucid chambers of the south
Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out, and smiled!"

Divine inspiration indeed! Poetry, that if read by the bedside of a
dying lover of nature, might

"Create a soul
Under the ribs of death!"

What in the name of goodness makes us suppose that a mean, and miserable
November day, even while we are thus Rhapsodising, is drizzling all
Edinburgh with the worst of all imaginable Scottish mists--an Easterly
Haur? We know that he infests all the year, but shows his poor spite in
its bleakest bitterness in March and in November. Earth and heaven are
not only not worth looking at in an Easterly Haur, but the Visible is
absolute wretchedness, and people wonder why they were born. The
visitation begins with a sort of characterless haze, waxing more and
more wetly obscure, till you know not whether it be rain, snow, or
sleet, that drenches your clothes in dampness, till you feel it in your
skin, then in your flesh, then in your bones, then in your marrow, and
then in your mind. Your blinking eyes have it too--and so, shut it as
you will, has your moping mouth. Yet the streets, though looking blue,
are not puddled, and the dead cat lies dry in the gutter. There is no
eavesdropping--no gushing of waterspouts. To say it rained would be no
breach of veracity, but a mere misstatement of a melancholy fact. The
truth is, that _the weather cannot rain_, but keeps spit, spit,
spitting, in a style sufficient to irritate Socrates--or even Moses
himself; and yet true, veritable, sincere, genuine, and authentic Rain
could not--or if he could would not--so thoroughly soak you and your
whole wardrobe, were you to allow him a day to do it, as that shabby
imitation of a tenth-rate shower, in about the time of a usual sized
sermon. So much cold and so much wet, with so little to show for it, is
a disgrace to the atmosphere, which it will take weeks of the sunniest
the weather can afford to wipe off. But the stores of sunniness which it
is in the power of Winter in this northern latitude to accumulate,
cannot be immense; and therefore w