ven doing battle with it is
something worthy and well chosen. If there is cruelty in the sea, and
terror in high places, and malice lurking in profound darkness, there
is no one of these qualities in the wind, but only power. Here is
strength too full for such negations as cruelty, as malice, or as
fear; and that strength in a solemn manner proves and tests health in
our own souls. For with terror (of the sort I mean--terror of the
abyss or panic at remembered pain, and in general, a losing grip of
the succours of the mind), and with malice, and with cruelty, and with
all the forms of that Evil which lies in wait for men, there is the
savour of disease. It is an error to think of such things as power set
up in equality against justice and right living. We were not made for
them, but rather for influences large and soundly poised; we are not
subject to them but to other powers that can always enliven and
relieve. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of
the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort
in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the
mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward
on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has
had a great host about him. It is as though he had experienced armies.
The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in
variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening
innumerable powers in man. And the days of high wind are days in which
a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and
blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of
war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in
companionship are at their noblest.

It is pretended sometimes (less often perhaps now than a dozen years
ago) that certain ancient pursuits congenial to man will be lost to
him under his new necessities; thus men sometimes talk foolishly of
horses being no longer ridden, houses no longer built of wholesome
wood and stone, but of metal; meat no more roasted, but only baked;
and even of stomachs grown too weak for wine. There is a fashion of
saying these things, and much other nastiness. Such talk is (thank
God!) mere folly; for man will always at last tend to his end, which
is happiness, and he will remember again to do all those things which
serve that end. So it is with the uses of the wind, and especially