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THE EAST WIND.

ID any body ever hear of the east wind when he was a boy? We remember no such thing. We never heard a word about it all the time we were at school. There was the schoolmaster with his ferula; but there was no east wind. Our elders might have talked about it; but such calamities of theirs are inaudible in the ears of the juvenile. A fine day was a fine day, let the wind bet in what quarter it might. While writing this article, we hear everybody complaining that the fine weather is polluted by the presence of the east wind. It has lasted so long as to force itself upon people's attention. The ladies confess their exasperation with it, for making free without being agreeable; and as ladies' quarrels are to be taken up, and there is no other way of grappling with this invisible enemy, we have put ourselves in a state of editorial resentment, and have resolved to write an article against it.

The winds are among the most mysterious of the operations of the elements. We know not whence they come, or whither they go; how they spring up, or how fall; why they prevail so long, after such and such a fashion, in certain quarters; nor, above all, why some of them should be at once so lasting and

apparently so pernicious. We know some of their uses; but there is a great deal about them we do not know, and it is difficult to put them to the question. As the sailor said of the ghosts, "We do not understand their tackle." What is very curious is, there seems to be one of them which prevails in some particular quarter, and has a character for malignity. In the South, there is the Sirocco, an ugly customer, dark, close, suffocating, making melancholy; which blots the sky, and dejects the spirits of the most lively. In the Oriental parts of the earth, there is the Tifoon, supposed by some to be the Typhon or Evil Principle of the ancients; and in Europe we have the East Wind, whom the ancients reckoned among the sons of Typhon. The winds, Mr. Keightley tells us, were divided by the Greeks into "wholesome and noxious; the former of which, Boreas (North Wind), Zephyrus (West Wind), and Notus (South Wind), were, according to Hesiod, the children of Astræus (Starry) and Eos (Dawn). The other winds, he says (probably meaning only those who blow from the east), are the race of Typhoëus, whom he describes as the last and most terrible child of Earth. In Greece, as over the rest of Europe, the East Wind was pernicious.”

In England, the east wind is accounted pernicious if it last long; and it is calculated, we believe, that it blows during three parts even of our fine weather. We have known a single blast of it blight a long row of plants in a greenhouse. Its effects upon the vegetable creation are sure to be visible, if it last any time; and it puts invalids into a very unpleasant state, by drying the pores of the skin, and thus giving activity

to those numerous internal disorders, of which none are more painful than what the moderns call nervousness, and our fathers understood by the name of the vapors" or the "spleen," which, as Shenstone observed, is often little else than obstructed perspiration. An irritable poet exclaimed,

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'Scarce in a showerless day the heavens indulge

Our melting clime, except the baleful East
Withers the tender spring, and sourly checks
The fancy of the year. Our fathers talked
Of summers, balmy airs, and skies serene :
Good Heaven! for what unexpiated crimes
This dismal change?"

This terrible question we shall answer presently. Meantime, the suffering poet may be allowed to have been a little irritated. It is certainly provoking to have this invisible enemy invading a whole nation at his will, and sending among us, for weeks together, his impertinent and cutting influence; drying up our skins, blowing dust in our eyes, contradicting our sunshine, smoking our suburbs, behaving boisterously to our women, aggravating our scolds, withering up our old gentlemen and ladies, nullifying the respite from smoke at Bow, perplexing our rooms between hot and cold, closing up our windows, exasperating our rheumatisms, basely treating the wounds of our old soldiers, spoiling our gardens, preventing our voyages, assisting thereby our Bow - street runners, hurting our tempers, increasing our melancholies, deteriorating our night-airs, showing our wives' ankles, disordering our little children, not being good for our beasts, perplexing our pantaloons (to know which to

put on), deranging our ringlets, scarifying our eyes, thinning our apple - tarts, endangering our dances, getting damned our weathercocks, barbarizing our creditors, incapacitating our debtors, obstructing all moist processes in the arts, hindering our astronomers,* tiring our editors, and endangering our sales.

The poet asks what crimes could have brought upon us the evils of our climate? He should ask the schoolboy that runs about, the Gypsy who laughs at the climate, or the ghost of some old English yeoman before taxes and sedentary living abounded. An east wind, like every other evil, except folly and ill intention, is found, when properly grappled with, to be not only no evil, but a good, at least a negative one, sometimes a positive; and even folly and ill intention are but the mistakes of a community in its progress from bad to good. How evil comes at all, we cannot say. It suffices us to believe, that it is in its nature fugitive; and that it is the nature of good, when good returns, to outlast it beyond all calculation. If we led the natural lives to which we hope and believe that the advance of knowledge and comfort will bring us round, we should feel the east wind as little as the Gypsies do: it would be the same refreshment to us that it is to the glowing schoolboy, after his exercise; and as to nipping our fruits and flowers, some living creature makes a dish of them, if we do not. With these considerations, we should be well content to recognize the concordia discors that harmonizes the inanimate creation. If it were not for

* During east winds, astronomers are unable to pursue their observations, on account of a certain hazy motion in the air.

the east wind in this country, we should probably have too much wet; our winters would not dry up; our June fields would be unpassable; we should not be able to enjoy the west wind itself, the Zephyr with his lap full of flowers. And, upon the supposition that there is no peril in the east wind that may not ultimately be nullified, we need not trouble ourselves with the question, why the danger of excessive moisture must be counteracted by a wind full of dryness. All the excesses of the elements will one day be pastime for the healthy arms and discerning faculties of discovering man.

And so we finish our vituperations in the way in which such things ought generally to be finished, with a discovery that the fault objected to is in ourselves, and renewed admiration of the abundance of promise. in all the works of Nature.