A GREAT FROST 237 



and an American who wrote of the "dreadful wilder- 

 ness of mind " I read it when a boy : 



There is a wilderness more dark 

 Than groves of fir on Huron's shore. 



Many of us have just such visions of the person that 

 nature is on occasions to us : a woman-Titan, a beau- 

 tiful female, the mother of men and of all life, all 

 breathing sentient things, and of grass and flowers ; a 

 being in whom all beauty in the visible world and all 

 sweetness and love and compassion in a mother's 

 heart and in all hearts are concentrated and intensified. 

 But it is a personification of a reclaimed and softened 

 nature and of the soft conditions of life in which we 

 are nursed. My vision of nature as a person that 

 night had no softness or beauty in it and was not 

 woman. Standing on the hills I saw him coming up 

 from the illimitable moaning sea, riding on the blast 

 as on a chariot, and he was himself wind and cloud 

 and sea and land. He towered above the granite 

 hills, blotting out the stars with his streaming hair 

 which covered the heavens like a cloud. I saw his 

 face, dark as granite, as he rose up before me and 

 passed over the stony desolate hills, and his eyes 

 gazing straight before him were like two immense 

 round shields of grey ice and had no speculation 

 in them. This indeed was to my mind the most 

 dreadful thing, that this being, all-powerful and ever- 

 lasting, creator and slayer of all things that live, of 

 all beauty and sweetness and compassion, was himself 

 without knowledge or thought or emotion, and that 



