Let it point. Points beyond the midnight hour." Instead of lingering a moment more, and letting the fire out, the fire must be made up, and the table drawn nearer to it for an hour or two of writing. "And the night-wind rising, hark! How above there in the dark All the noisy chimneys blow!" • And then I think of Mr. Bickerstaffe's Tatler paper, written of a Christmas night, when its silence (unlike this boisterous one) and darkness disposed him to be more than ordinarily serious; and of the sentencemore likely Addison's than Steele's: "My mind is of such a particular cast, that the falling of a shower of rain, or the whistling of wind, at such a time, is apt to fill my thoughts with something awful and solemn." How different an entry from the "which did vex me" of Mr. Pepys' Diary. "About bedtime, it fell a-raining, and the house being all open WIND AND RAIN BY NIGHT. 133 at top, it vexed me, but there was no help for it." Or this again, a month later,-as one other specimen of the Pepysian Night Thoughts: "About three o'clock this morning, I waked with the noise of the rayne, having never in my life heard a more violent shower and then the catt was lockt in the chamber, and kept a great mewing, and leapt upon the bed, which made me I could not sleep a great while." After this sort was Mr. Pepys nocturnally disquieted, and his heart was put to proof "In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain was on the roof." A glance will suffice at Horace Walpole, at a time when his nerves were shattered, and the country seemed going to the bad: "I could write volumes," he tells Lady Ossory; "but recollect that you are not alone as I am, given up to melancholy ideas, with the rain beating down on the skylight, and gusts of wind. On other nights, if I heard a noise, I should think it some desperate gamester breaking open my house: now, every flap of a door is a pistol." That was the sort of night, and that the sort of humour, in which the elegant lord of Strawberryhill would envy the "tired ploughman," who, "dry and warm "Hears, half asleep, the rising storm Against the casement's tinkling pane." Half hears, and is only the cozier for the semi-sense. 134 WIND AND RAIN BY NIGHT. In the same metre, and to the same tune, runs a The wind is mad upon the moors, And thinks of angels in her prayers; Then sleeps with his small hand in hers." If that is a bit of word-painting, so, with a true sense of the picturesque, is this stanza of the laureate's : "Risest thou thus, dim dawn again, And howlest, issuing out of night, With blasts that blow the poplar white, Compare with which the opening stanzas of perhaps the most piquant of all Owen Meredith's poems: a picture of midnight past-not a sound of aught through the silent house, but the wind at his prayers ; while the poet sat by the dying fire, and thought of the dear dead woman upstairs. "A night of tears! for the gusty rain Had ceased, but the eaves were dripping yet, Southey paints in Thalaba a night of darkness and of storms-that night on which his hero leads WIND AND RAIN BY NIGHT. 135 the Old Man into the Chamber of the Tomb, to roof him from the rain: "A night of storms! the wind Swept through the moonless sky, And moan'd among the pillar'd sepulchres; They heard the heavy rain Beat on the monument above. In silence on Oneiza's grave Her father and her husband sate." Mark, too, the Fair Penitent of Mr. Nicholas Rowe, in the tragedy once stock, now, shelved: "At night she watches, all the long long hours, With sighs as loud, and tears that fall as fast." And then, again, in quite another style, the opening of Bloomfield's favourite tale of honest miller and his dame; how one night a storm came on at bedtime, and kept them up the while it raged : "Meekly resign'd she sate, in anxious pain; He fill'd his pipe, and listen'd to the rain Roar'd in the dam, and lash'd the pebbled road : They heard, or thought they heard, a screaming child—” whereby hangs a tale; the tale of the Miller's Maid. The night of the gracious Duncan's murder, in the castle of Macbeth, is memorable for all time-for is not Shakspeare for all time? Lenox loquitur: "The night has been unruly; where we lay, Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they say, 136 NIGHT WINDS IN BURNS, WORDSWORTH, Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death; which might be, or might be something more than, the wailings of the wind. To feeling, pensive hearts, as Burns words it, all the shows and forms of Nature have a charm,— whether the summer kindly warms, with life and light, “Or winter howls, in gusty storms, And well we know how, when the westlin wind blaws loud and shrill, and the night's baith mirk and rainy, O, he'll get his plaid, and out he'll steal, an' owre the hills to Nannie, O. Or how, at another time, and in another mood, he wanders, pressed with care, along the lonely banks of Ayr, when the gloomy night is gathering fast, loud roars the wild inconstant blast; and as he sees the scowling tempest fly, chill runs his blood to hear it rave.-Wordsworth's Wanderer, while yet in his teens, is pictured as one "o'erpowered by Nature;" and in the first virgin passion of a soul communing with the glorious universe, "Full often wished he that the winds might rage When they were silent: far more fondly now Than in his earlier season did he love Tempestuous nights-the conflicts and the sounds One of the Noctes Ambrosiana opens with the |