THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

SSUREDLY the stormy days and nights which occur
during this season must bring to the minds of many
the sublime Bible imagery in which Nature is pressed
into the service of things spiritual, and the "seen
caused to symbolise the "unseen."
A grand proces-

sion of clouds is drifted across the sky, and closes
around an amber sunset; and we remember-

"Who maketh the clouds his chariot :

Who walketh upon the wings of the wind:"

"And he made darkness his pavilions round about him."

In the dead of night we are waked by a great gust of tempest, and it is comforting to know that God is controlling that wild wind as a steed is curbed by its rider; but we can also recognise how true a comparison the desolate patriarch used when he said

"Terrors are turned upon me :

They pursue my soul as the wind.”

And when in the morning we behold how transient the storm has been, and that men see again "the bright light which is in the clouds, for the wind passeth, and cleanseth them," we recall yet another vivid metaphor of the same inspired poet

"O remember that my life is wind!

Mine eye shall no more see good :"

whereas his God had in store for him at the time the very highest forms of earthly blessing. But the plea for Divine forbearance and tender dealing is said to have been recognised on another occasion, when the Lord "many a time turned his anger away" from his rebel Israelites, and "did not stir up all his wrath :"

"For he remembered that they were but flesh;

A wind that passeth away, and cometh not again."

In God's great storehouse of means, these "wings of the wind" among the prominent instruments of his providence. Fitful and fleeting as the winds appear, and utterly capricious, the student of Nature knows

that they are ruled by laws as definite and as changeless as govern any other phenomena in creation. He knows that a wonderful system of them surrounds our globe-currents as marked as those of ocean are those of air. There are the trade-winds, blowing perpetually from the

north-east at our British side of the equator, and perpetually from the south-east at the other side, within well-ascertained limits. There are the monsoons of the Indian Ocean (named from the Malay moussin, season), blowing for five months accurately in opposite directions, the north-east wind becoming south-west at a certain period, and the south

THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

east wind north-west.

And He has the key of the change, and the second cause of all the winds of heaven, in the simple alternations of heat and cold. In the inter-tropical regions there is a perpetual column of air rarefied by the heat, and which ascends till it reaches cooler regions of the atmosphere, when it flows over on either side of the equator towards the northern and southern temperate zones. These currents,

modified by the general movement of the atmosphere from the revolution of the earth, constitute the chief element in the atmospheric circulation. Minor and local currents are determined by the configuration of land and sea, producing endless diversities of climate and temperature.

Concerning such a breeze, the poet Bryant wrote, in one Summer noon of "scorching heat and dazzling light,"—

"Why so slow,

Gentle and voluble spirit of the air?

Oh, come and breathe upon the fainting earth
Coolness and life. Is it that in his caves
He hears me? See, on yonder woody ridge
The pine is bending his proud top, and now
Among the nearer groves, chestnut and oak
Are tossing their green boughs about. He comes !
Lo, where the grassy meadow runs in waves!
The deep distressful silence of the scene
Breaks up with mingling of unnumbered sounds,
And universal motion. He is come,

Shaking a shower of blossoms from the shrubs,
And bearing on their fragrance, and he brings
Music of birds, and rustling of young boughs,
And sound of swaying branches, and the voice
Of distant waterfalls."

Beside which American picture we may place with advantage the cabinet drawing of our English Tennyson—

Each had Nature for his model; and so had a greater than either when he described

"The visitation of the winds

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deafening clamours, in the slippery clouds,
Till, with the hurly, death itself awakes."

This stormy season seldom or never passes over without nights appropriate to such lines-nights whereon death was indeed awaked to

the destruction of the poor mariner. Oh, that many more of those who go down to the sea in ships, and do business in great waters, knew of that Divine "Man who is a hidingplace from the wind, and a covert from the tempest!"

In the Bible, whose great doctrine next to redemption is that of particular providence, we often have instances recorded when the Lord drew forth a wind out of his treasuries for some special purpose. He made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters" of the deluge (so aptly named in German the sin

flood) were assuaged. At the catastrophe of the Red Sea

"The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, my hand shall destroy them:

THOU didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them:

They sank as lead in the mighty waters."

In all ancient or modern poetry there is not a finer climax of contrast: the excitement and fury of the enemy, the utter ease with which the Supreme conquers, so that no more than lead sinking in the sea offers resistance, did the mighty hosts of Pharaoh strike a stroke for life.

Likewise, around the murmuring camp were millions of quails, swept thither by "a wind from before the Lord." They had said, scornfully, "Can he give flesh?" and, lo! the breeze of the desert brings the timely donation of countless myriads. When Elijah was to be reproved for his