I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in
New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think
it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment
and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are
promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article,
and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it. There is
a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the
stranger's admiration--and regret. The weather is always doing something
there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new
designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it
gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the
spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of
weather inside of four-and-twenty hours. It was I that made the fame
and fortune of that man that had that marvelous collection of weather on
exhibition at the Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners. He
was going to travel all over the world and get specimens from all the
climes. I said, “Don't you do it; you come to New England on a favorable
spring day.” I told him what we could do in the way of style, variety,
and quantity. Well, he came and he made his collection in four days. As
to variety, why, he confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather
that he had never heard of before. And as to quantity--well, after he
had picked out and discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not
only had weather enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out;
weather to sell; to deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the
poor. The people of New England are by nature patient and forbearing,
but there are some things which they will not stand. Every year they
kill a lot of poets for writing about “Beautiful Spring.” These are
generally casual visitors, who bring their notions of spring from
somewhere else, and cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about
spring. And so the first thing they know the opportunity to inquire
how they feel has permanently gone by. Old Probabilities has a mighty
reputation for accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it. You
take up the paper and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off
what to-day's weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the
Middle States, in the Wisconsin region. See him sail along in the joy
and pride of his power till he gets to New England, and then see his
tail drop. He doesn't know what the weather is going to be in New
England. Well, he mulls over it, and by and by he gets out something
about like this: Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the
southward and westward and eastward, and points between, high and low
barometer swapping around from place to place; probable areas of rain,
snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with
thunder and lightning. Then he jots down this postscript from his
wandering mind, to cover accidents: “But it is possible that the program
may be wholly changed in the mean time.” Yes, one of the brightest gems
in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is
only one thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be
plenty of it--a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end
of the procession is going to move first. You fix up for the drought;
you leave your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you
get drowned. You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand
from under, and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the
first thing you know you get struck by lightning. These are great
disappointments; but they can't be helped. The lightning there is
peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't
leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd
think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there. And
the thunder. When the thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape and
saw, and key up the instruments for the performance, strangers say,
“Why, what awful thunder you have here!” But when the baton is raised
and the real concert begins, you'll find that stranger down in the
cellar with his head in the ash-barrel. Now as to the size of the
weather in New England lengthways, I mean. It is utterly disproportioned
to the size of that little country. Half the time, when it is packed as
full as it can stick, you will see that New England weather sticking out
beyond the edges and projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles
over the neighboring states. She can't hold a tenth part of her weather.
You can see cracks all about where she has strained herself trying to
do it. I could speak volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New
England weather, but I will give but a single specimen. I like to hear
rain on a tin roof. So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye
to that luxury. Well, sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin? No,
sir; skips it every time. Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely
to do honor to the New England weather--no language could do it justice.
But, after all, there is at least one or two things about that weather
(or, if you please, effects produced, by it) which we residents would
not like to part with. If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage,
we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which
compensates for all its bullying vagaries--the ice-storm: when a
leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top--ice that
is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung
with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and
white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the
branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and
drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored
fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from
blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold--the tree becomes a
spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands
there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature,
of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make
the words too strong.