Dancing on the brazen beams, Yet within that secret chamber, Hiding ever in the gloom, Stealing through that chamber door. Round, all round the unconscious Weaver, Brighter tints of joy appear, Fall upon his list'ning ear: "Still the wheels are turning, turning Move obedient to thy will. For one hour of soothing rest, Lay aside thy care and toiling, Till repose, with soft beguiling, Nerve thee for the toil and test." See! the Weaver bends and listens To that sweet enchanting tone, Till his drowsy eyes are closing, And his weary hands hang down. See the watchers bending o'er him! How they strive to break the charm! How their white wings throng around him! Hear them cry in wild alarm, "Rouse thee for the work before thee! Break! O break that fatal spell! Hark! that voice is thundering o'er theeWeave the warp, O weave it well!" Yet the syren's voice of music Falls melodious on his ear, And the enchanted vail is woven O'er his vision, once so clear. Lower sinks his head, and lower, Drooping o'er the brazen beams, While a thousand shadowy phantoms Paint the colors of his dreams. And he dreams he still is weaving Brighter tints than e'er before; Wealth, and fame, and pride, and pleasure, Joyous ease, and glittering treasure, Dance his eager gaze before; Azure tints of beaming beauty, Gleams of rainbow-cinctured joy, Brilliant hopes, and power, and glory, Gold that shines without alloy. While they feed his dreaming vision With these hues of light and bloom, They are busy with his labors They are weaving in his loom; In the blackness of despair: Shutting out the blessed sunlight See! the sun in fiery splendor Up to his meridian sweeps, Oft his beams are quench'd and clouded, When they plead with earnest cries: Swifter flies that wingèd shuttle, With the crimson hue of crime, Wrought with many a shade of anguish, Woven in the warp of time. And the thread of truth is broken, Virtue fades, and calm delight, Faith, and hope, and love, no longer Turn and see! the sun is sinking Slowly down the western sky, Now a strange and boding silence Wakes the startled echoes round. And the dreamer's vision fled! Now he wakes; he gazes round him; Hark! he hears that voice once more! While the night storms round him roar. Weaver, pause, thy work is done; Now the shuttle standeth still, And the silver wheels no longer Move obedient to thy will. Every brittle cord is broken, And that warp of glittering goldIt is woven-It is finished Wrought with guilt in every fold. Yet see! ah see! a million eyes Are gazing in upon thee now; And through thy broken, crumbling walls, A light, a strange, bewildering glow, A second morn, is pouring in Its searching splendor through thy room, And myriad voices wail around thee, O Weaver of the magic loom! Now unroll the Web of Life! Darest thou that web unroll? Dar'st thou, to the light of day, That web of guilt and shame display? Yet this must clothe thy shuddʼring soul. O, thou hast rocked thyself in slumbers Till foes have wrought thy destiny! Thou hast woven dreams of folly They have woven death for thee. THUNDER AND LIGHTNING. THERE By HERE are two kinds of electricity; one vitreous or positive, the other resinous or negative; and both kinds are produced in the atmosphere by various causes, chiefly by evaporation. We may form a slight idea of the extent of evaporation carried on over the whole globe, over all the rivers and lakes and seas, the stagnant pools and latent moisture, the hidden springs and boundless oceans, when we remember that three hundred millions of hogsheads of water rise daily into vapor over the Mediterranean alone. condensation, or the change which that evaporated vapor undergoes when returning to a fluid state through decrease of temperature; by vegetation, by combustion, and by friction. This last arises when masses of air, moving in contrary directions, encounter each other. The friction of their surfaces develops electricity, which is especially active when these masses differ in degrees of moisture and temperature; the cold developing negative, and the warm positive, electricity. The friction of the wind, as it passes over trees, houses, mountains, and other high objects, is also held to set free the electricity of the atmosphere; so that we can understand why thunder-storms should be almost always accompanied by strong winds, and should rarely or never occur in perfectly still weather. Clouds charged with electricity of one kind meet and coalesce in good fellowship enough; but when those which bear a different kind meet together, a violent shock is the consequence. Rains are formed by the meeting of different winds, as thunder-storms by the contact of opcharged with moisture, meets with a cold A warm soft air, posing electricities. wind direct from the polar regions. The cold north wind condenses and globulates the vapor, which falls to the earth in the form of Scotch mists or showers. First, before a storm arises, is seen the cirrus, that light fibrous curl-like cloud, which stretches in undulating waves or long lines over the sky, sometimes curling out like the lightest and most graceful feathers, or like the sweeping grain of knotted woods. This broadens out into the cirro-cumulus, or sounder cloud; those little round masses which lie near together but yet separate, and give the travelers' tales which set forth how they, the travelers, journeying over the Alps and the Brocken, have seen storms forming below them. Yet Monsieur Abbadie found in Ethiopia that an October storm was only about two hundred and thirtythree yards above the earth; but the highest which he noted was one in Feb mottled or speckled skies which are so beautiful in summer afternoons when they bode no mischief and contain no evil. Then the cirrho-cumulus gathers itself into the cumulus proper, or strachen-cloud, large heaped-up masses that look like carved marble or sun-covered boulders in the deep blue sky, those dazzling white day clouds which children gaze at won-ruary, at about two thousand two hundred deringly as if they were solid masses built up in the heavens, and which even older brains can scarcely credit to be mere imponderable vapor. These are the forerunners of the storm-cloud, that dark gray, rugged mass, with its sharp and jagged edges, from which stream down both health and destruction to the world below; that cloud, darker and more threatening than the nimbus or rain-cloud, with which people who are not good observers so often confound it. and forty yards, or about a mile and a quarter. As sound travels three hundred and seventy-five yards per second, the distance of time elapsing between the flash and the report may be taken as a basis for calculation by any one with nerve sufficient to time a thunder-storm by the minute hand of his watch. Pliny says it never thunders in Egypt. Plutarch that it never thunders in Abyssinia. We know now that both of these assertions are mistakes, though indeed Egypt is singularly exempt from frequency of storm; for storms are correspondent with rains, and as it seldom rains in Egypt, thunders and lightnings are equal Storms never come from the perfectly uniform and regular clouds which sometimes cover all the sky. Storm clouds have always torn and angry edges, as one would expect from them, fierce and rivingly rare. It never rains in Lower Peru, as they are, instruments of death, and among nature's earliest embodiments of rage and devastation. Storms are manypatterned. Franklin says that a thunderstorm never comes from one cloud only, and Saussure agrees with him; but other meteorologists (notably, Bergman and Duchamel de Monceau, good names enough) assert the contrary; and Marcovelle states that on the twelfth of September, 1747, the sky at Toulouse was perfectly clear, except for one little cloud, from which suddenly burst a thunderbolt that killed a woman named Bordenave as she stood before the house. If that unhappy femme Bordenave bore but an indifferent character, if sorcery and the black art were included among her gifts, we may be sure how the occasion was improved by all the anti-witchcraft world; and how an inevitable natural law was translated into a single act of Divine vengeance, calculated to strike terror into the hearts of all the sabbet-hauters, loup-garons, broomstickriders, black cat keepers, and familiar nourishers in Toulouse. As storms always commence with the accumulation of the cirrus-cloud, and as the cirrus-cloud floats very high, it follows that storms are generally very high above the earth. Kaemtz, one of the greatest meteorologists, doubts all the or so rarely as to be outside all meteorological consideration; consequently, say at Lima, storms of thunder and lightning are as little known as hurricanes of wind and rain. Storms are also rare at the North Pole, and never occur in midseas, at a certain distance from land. The rainy days at Cairo are only three or four in the year; the storm days are about the same number. At Calcutta the average of storm days is sixty, and everywhere a broad parallel is kept; so that where there is most rain there is also most thunder and lightning. Storms come at the same times and seasons, and with striking regularity. In the tropics they accompany the wet seasons and the change of the monsoons; at Calcutta, with its sixty days of storm, not one occurs in November, December, or January; at Martinique and Guadaloupe none are known in December, January, February, or March. In mean latitudes very few storms occur in winter, and only a few in the hottest days of spring and autumn; more than one half come in summer, and generally in the day, rarely at night, either in the tropics or in the temperate zones. But the rule of summer storms does not hold absolutely for all places; for, on the western coast of America, and the eastern shores of the Adriatic, more occur in winter than in summer; in Greece more in autumn and spring; in Rome there is no difference between summer and autumn; at Bergen and at the Azores, where there are winter rains, they are most frequent in the cold and rainy weather; at Kingston, in Jamaica, it thunders every day for five consecutive months, though the adjacent islands are tranquil; also at Popayan, in Columbia, during a certain season, there is thunder every day. Woods, mountains, and broken land cause and attract storms; but their frequency is not always referable to the configuration of a district. At Paris, for instance, the average number of thunderdays is fourteen; and Paris is not on a dead level; while at Denainvilliers, between Orleans and Pithiviers, one of the flattest districts possible, the average is raised to twenty-one. Other atmospheric causes, then, must be in operation which are not yet made fully manifest, and which remain to be investigated. There are three kinds of lightning, says Monsieur Arago: forked, sheet, and spherical. Forked lightning comes in very slender flashes, generally white, but is sometimes blue or violet colored. Fine as these flashes are, they often divide into three or more branches: as when, in 1718, twenty-four churches were struck in the environs of Saint Pol de Léon, but only three peals of thunder were heard. The flashes of forked lightning are most destructive. They are nowhere seen to more terrible perfection than when lighting up the dark ravines and black precipices of a mountainous district. Even in England, among the Cumberland mountains, the thunderstorms have a majesty and awful sublimity which no dweller on the plains can understand. Sheet lightning is comparatively harmless. Some of those thunderless summer lightnings are distant sheet lightnings, too distant to allow of the thunder, which yet exists, being heard. Dark red, blue, or violet are the principal colors of this form of electricity, which has neither the whiteness nor swiftness of the forked. Spherical lightnings are what are called vulgarly thunderbolts; luminous masses, or fiery globes, which descend slowly to the earth, and make lightning conductors useless. On the night of the 14th of April, 1718, Deslandes saw three globes of fire fall on the church of Couesnon, near Brest, and destroy it utterly; and, on the 3d of July, 1725, during the height of a thunder tempest, an enormous globe of fire fell and killed a shepherd and five sheep. This was not so terrible, though, as the Ethiopian storm, reported by Abbadie, which destroyed two thousand goats and the goatherd by one single flash. We quote these assertions modestly, if somewhat doubtfully; not presuming to place a limit to the wonderful forces of nature, of which the more we learn the less we seem to know, yet expressing ourselves humbly on the uncertainty of testimony, and the proneness to exaggeration common to humanity. The balance between skepticism and credulity is the most difficult of all balances to hold evenly. These summer lightnings, of which we have spoken, have been taken by some to mean essentially, harmless interchanges of electricity, the atmosphere seeking its own electrical equilibrium. But it will generally (not always) be found that, during their appearance, there has been a storm somewhere on earth, where, what was but lambent summer lightning to the far-off spectator, has proved to be deadly destructive fire to some hapless dweller underneath. In a July night of 1783 De Saussure, at the Hôspital de Grinsel, under a calm clear sky, saw, in the direction of Geneva, a thick band of clouds, which gave out thunderless lightnings. This was but summer lightning to him; but the Genevese were suffering all the horrors and ravages of a storm such as the oldest inhabitant had never witnessed. And in 1813 Howard, at Tottenham, saw on the south-east horizon, and under a clear starry sky, some pale summer lightnings, which proved afterward to be a violent storm raging between Calais and Dunkerque. The question of distant storms, and how far the reflection of them could be possibly visible, and whether this sheet or summer lightning necessarily always argued a distant storm, was being once discussed at the philosophical society of Geneva. When the meeting broke up the southern horizon was illuminated with the very form of lightning under dispute. Some days after, the newspapers spoke of a violent storm in the Pays de Vaud, Wurtemberg, and Bavaria, which seemed conclusive enough as to how far reflection could be carried, if not as to the universally uniform character of distant sheet lightning. For there are, in truth, such things as thunderless summer lightnings, lightnings without storms and without dangers, and as frequent under the tropics as in our own temperate latitudes. There is probably, and more than probably, thunder with these flashes, but at too great a height from us to be heard. Besides, the higher the atmosphere the more rarified it becomes, and the more rarified the medium, the less intensity there is of sound; but we can scarcely imagine that lightnings can be interchanged without any accompanying report, or that a certain law of nature can be contravened without the intervention of any higher agency, or the interruption of an opposing law. There being lightnings without thunder, so there are thunders without lightning. Volney, among many other witnesses of similar phenomena, speaks of violent thunderings one morning at Pontchartrain, under a clear sky, and without lightning; but in a quarter of an hour the heavens clouded thickly over, and a heavy hailstorm fell, the stones as big as his fist. The longest thunder-roll (which seems so interminable to those who are nervous during storms) lasts only from thirty-five to fifty seconds; and the space of time between the roll and the flash varies, according to distance, from five, four, three, and even half a second, to forty-two, fortyseven, forty-nine, and seventy-two seconds. But the half-second interval is very rare, and only found in storms of the closest and most violent character. We need scarcely add that the nearer a storm the more dangerous. Also, the higher the body the more likely it is to be struck; as, for instance, all mountains, trees, high buildings, and, in the midst of a plain, men and animals. Trees, bushes, and buildings, are peculiarly lightning conductors, and specially liable to be struck. For this reason it is wise to avoid the neighborhood of trees during a storm; not even trusting to the old poetic legend of the exemption of all the laurel tribe, for love of one fair Daphne; nor to Hugh Maxwell's assertion that the beech, maple, and birch, are anticonductors, like that classic laurel; nor to Captain Dibdin's belief in pines; nor, in fact, to any private or personal favorite among forest-trees or shrubs; for they are all equally dangerous to human neighbors during a storm, and equally powerful conductors; their power varying only as they are taller or more humid than their fellows. Thunderbolts have special attraction to certain places as well as to certain objects. No one in New Granada, says Monsieur Arago, willingly inhabits El Sitio de Tumba Barreto, near the gold mine of the Vega de Supia, because of the frequency of thunderbolts there. Even while Monsieur Boussingault was crossing El Sitio, the black who guided him was struck by lightning. La Loma de Pitago, near Popayan, is another locality of doubtful electric fame. A young botanist, Monsieur Plancheman, was determined to cross La Loma on a stormy day, in spite of all remonstrances, and was struck dead by a thunderbolt. On the 29th of June, 1763, a thunderbolt struck the bell-tower of a certain church near Laval, and, entering the church, caused great damage; on the 20th of June, 1764, a thunderbolt struck the same bell-tower, entered the church, and melted the same gilding, blackened the same holy vessels, and in the very same spot as the preceding year made anew two holes which had been filled up. There is no more striking instance on record of the uniform action of natural laws than this. We believe, too, that any inhabitant of a mountainous district could bear out our own assertion and observation, that where once a thunderbolt has been seen to fall, or forked lightning to strike, there surely would the same accidents occur during the worst storms of succeeding years. We may be certain that there is no such thing as chance in nature. Chance is simply our ignorance which cannot foresee necessary consequences, because it does not understand the foregoing laws; there is no such thing as blind unmeaning hazard, without necessity, or without law. Chemical, mechanical, and physical effects followed on electrical phenomena, which any one may see repeated on a minute scale by an electrical machine. Lightning melts and vitrifies masses of rock, sometimes covering them with a yellowish-green enamel, studded with opaque or semi-transparent lumps. But it has never been known to melt any metallic substance of a certain thickness. Watchsprings, small chains, points, and parts of swords and daggers, fine lines or threads of metal, or thin layers and washes, have been known to have been thoroughly melted by a lightning-stroke. Larger masses, heavy chains, and the like have been soft| ened, and bent, and twisted, but not melted. |