DEAR SIR,--I read with great interest your first lecture at Oxford
on cloud and wind (very indifferently reported in 'The Times'). You
have given a name to a wind I've known for years. You call it the
plague--I call it the devil-wind: _e. g._, on April 29th, 1882,
morning warmer, then rain storms from east; afternoon, rain
squalls; wind, west by south, rough; barometer falling awfully;
4.30 p.m., tremendous wind.--April 30th, all the leaves of the
trees, all plants black and dead, as if a fiery blast had swept
over them. _All the hedges on windward side black as black tea._

Another devil-wind came towards the end of last summer. The next
day, all the leaves were falling sere and yellow, as if it were
late autumn.

I am, dear sir,
Yours faithfully,
A. H. BIRKETT."

I remember both these blights well; they were entirely terrific;
but only sudden maxima of the constant morbific power of this
wind;--which, if Mr. Birkett saw my _personal_ notices of,
intercalated among the scientific ones, he would find alluded to in
terms quite as vigorously damning as he could desire: and the
actual effect of it upon my thoughts and work has been precisely
that which would have resulted from the visible phantom of an evil
spirit, the absolute opponent of the Queen of the Air,--Typhon
against Athena,--in a sense of which I had neither the experience
nor the conception when I wrote the illustrations of the myth of
Perseus in 'Modern Painters.' Not a word of all those explanations
of Homer and Pindar could have been written in weather like that
of the last twelve years; and I am most thankful to have got them
written, before the shadow came, and I could still see what Homer
and Pindar saw. I quote one passage only--Vol. v., p. 141--for the
sake of a similitude which reminds me of one more thing I have to
say here--and a bit of its note--which I think is a precious little
piece, not of word-painting, but of simply told feeling--(_that_,
if people knew it, is my real power).

"On the Yorkshire and Derbyshire hills, when the rain-cloud is low
and much broken, and the steady west wind fills all space with its
strength,[B] the sun-gleams fly like golden vultures; they are
flashes rather than shinings; the dark spaces and the dazzling race
and skim along the acclivities, and dart and _dip from crag to
dell, swallow-like_."

The dipping of t