68 LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY 



tion is still more picturesque, but I doubt if it is a 

 bit better philosophy. "I compare the earth and 

 her atmosphere," he said to Eckermann, "to a great 

 living being perpetually inhaling and exhaling. If 

 she inhale she draws the atmosphere to her, so that, 

 coming near her surface, it is condensed to clouds and 

 rain. This state I call water-affirmative. " The op- 

 posite state, when the earth exhales and sends the 

 watery vapors upward so that they are dissipated 

 through the whole space of the higher atmosphere, 

 he called "water-negative." 



This is good literature, and worthy the great poet ; 

 the science of it I would not be so willing to vouch 

 for. 



The poets, more perhaps than the scientists, have 

 illustrated and held by the great law of alternation, 

 of ebb and flow, of turn and return, in nature. An 

 equilibrium, or, what is the same thing, a straight 

 line, Nature abhors more than she does a vacuum. 

 If the moisture of the air were uniform, or the heat 

 uniform, that is, in equilibrio, how could it rain? 

 what would turn the scale? But these things are 

 heaped up, are in waves. There is always a prepon- 

 derance one way or the other; always "a steep in- 

 equality." Down this incline the rain comes, and 

 up the other side it goes. The high barometer trav- 

 els like the crest of a sea, and the low barometer like 

 the trough. When the scale kicks the beam in one 

 place, it is correspondingly depressed in some other. 

 When the east is burning up, the west is generally 

 drowning out. The weather, we say, is always in 



