Rain charm

“ The rain of spring is brisk, fragrant, charged with life-giving warmth. I welcome it delightedly as it visits the earth, enriches the streams, waters the hills abundantly, makes the furrows soft with showers for the seed, elicits a perfume which I cannot breathe deep enough. ”

“ The grumbling rain in a foamy gray tide
From the rusty roof-spouts is welling.
Now, weather-cock, turn in the wind and hark
What the rain-spouts sing as the day grows dark.—
"Hoohoo!" comes his crow out-swelling. ”

“ All along the middle garden walk the Gay Folk are holding up great fluted cups of ruby and gold and pearl. It is not raining now, but it rained all day—a rain scented with lilacs. I like all kinds of weather and I like rainy days—soft, misty, rainy days when the Wind Woman, just shakes the tops of the spruces gently; and wild, tempestuous, streaming rainy days. I like being shut in by the rain—I like to hear it thudding on the roof, and beating on the panes and pouring off the eaves, while the Wind Woman skirls like a mad old witch in the woods, and through the garden. ”

“ One of those soft, long-continued summer rains which pour down from morning to night without any hope of change, refreshing and restoring everything that had begun to droop in the too fervid sun, but shutting the doors of the house against the all-pervading moisture, and making all rambles impossible. Few things are more depressing to a heart already deeply weighted than this persistent rain. ”

“ A cloud, heavy with rain, drifts across the sky, and big, cool drops splash with a hissing noise in the fire, upon our upturned faces, upon the warm, flower-sown earth which exhales, like incense, the odours of sun-heated soil and summer shower. ”

“ Spring rain is beautiful, impartial, lovable. With pearly drops it washes every leaf on tree and bush, ministers equally to salutary herbs and noxious growths, searches out every living thing that needs its beneficence. ”

“ How wondrous fine are the particles in showers of dew, thousands required for a single drop, growing in the dark as silently as the grass! What pains are taken to keep this wilderness in health,—showers of snow, showers of rain, showers of dew, floods of light, floods of invisible vapor, clouds, winds, all sorts of weather, interaction of plant on plant, animal on animal, etc., beyond thought! How fine Nature’s methods! How deeply with beauty is beauty overlaid! ”

“ Even when it rained—and it did rain sometimes—who could fail to see the beauty, all its own, of the green of grass, and the darker stems and branches of trees, showing faintly through the veil of the mist and the soft descending shower? ”

“ The song of the bird, the murmur of the stream, the breathing fragrance of spring, the soft voluptuousness of summer, the golden pomp of autumn; earth with its mantle of refreshing green, and heaven with its deep, delicious blue and its cloudy magnificence, — all fill us with mute but exquisite delight, and we revel in the luxury of mere sensation. But in the depth of winter, when Nature lies despoiled of every charm, and wrapped in her shroud of sheeted snow, we turn for our gratifications to moral sources. ”

“ It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret cañons. Rain begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind comes up and drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such rains relieve like tears.
The same season brings the rains that have work to do, ploughing storms that alter the face of things. These come with thunder and the play of live fire along the rocks. They come with great winds that try the pines for their work upon the seas and strike out the unfit. ”

“ Who loves a rainy day?
I do! Let the rain fall; let the wind moan; let the leafless trees reach out their long attenuated fingers and tap against my casement; pile on the coal; wheel up the arm-chair; all hail loose ringlets and loose dressing-robe. Not a blessed son or daughter of Adam can get here to-day! ”

“ Prudence murmured, and listened to the falling of the rain without—wet darkness everywhere, the dismal darkness of a winter world sodden with the sky’s incessant weeping.
She clenched her hands upon the wet sill, and felt the rain drops on her hair.
“He is out there in the sunshine,” she thought; “and I’m here in the dark and the rain alone. It is easy to forget when the sun shines always.” ”

“ The night of the big wind was followed by a day and a night of gusts of wind and sleety rain; then followed a day and a night of rising clouds, then a day when the clouds were scattered and the sun was cold. That day the sunset was grim, white, and freezing cold.
In the morning there was a bright, warm sunrise, a breath of sweet, soft air, and unimaginable brightness and buoyancy, birds singing, squirrels barking, and all the dismal pangs banished. ”

“ Thunder-storms prowl and growl round the belted hills, spit themselves away in a few drops of rain, and leave the air more dead than before. In the woods, where even the faithful springs are beginning to run low, the pines and balsams have thrown out all their fragrance upon the heat and wait for the wind to bring news of the rain. ”

“ He has a deep inner enjoyment of the rain, as rain, and his sense of its beauty drinks it in as thirstily as does the drinking earth. It refreshes and cools his heart and brain; he longs to go forth into the fields, to feel its steady stream, to scent its fragrance; to stand under some heavy-foliaged chestnut-tree, and hear the rushing music on the crowded leaves. Let the drought have continued two months; let the glass have been, at last, steadily falling for a day or two; let, at last, a delicious mellow gloom have overspread the hot glaring heavens ”

“ As the storm whirls against the house with strong blasts of rain and snow, our excitement increases by watching the swaying trees, and by listening to the shaking windows, while the lawless winds howl and rage around the corner. When the winds settle from boisterousness into low complaints, and now and then fall into quiet utterances, musical murmurings, the rain pauses, the sky softens, and our minds grow calm and gentle. ”

“ All summer long the out-of-door gardens kept us busy, planting, weeding and watering. When we had had a week or two of sunshiny weather we began to wish a cloud would sail over the blue sky and bring the rain our thirsty flowers needed. ”

“ When shall we be able to walk again to the far hills, and plunge into the deep woods, and gather more cardinals along the river's margin? The track along which we trod is probably under water now. How inhospitable Nature is during a rain! In the fervid heat of sunny days, she still retains some degree of mercy for us; she has shady spots, whither the sun cannot come; but she provides no shelter against her storms. It makes one shiver to think how dripping with wet are those deep, umbrageous nooks, those overshadowed banks, where we find such enjoyment during sultry afternoons. ”

“ Every green thing, from tiniest grass-blade lying lowest, to highest waving tips of elms, also set thick with the water-pearls; all tossing and catching, and tossing and catching, in fairy game with the wind, and with the rain itself, always losing, always gaining, changing shape and place and number every moment, till the twinkling and shifting dazzle all eyes. ”

“ I love even those long rain-storms, that sap the icy fortresses of the lingering winter,—that melt the snows upon the hills, and swell the mountain-brooks,—that make the pools heave up their glassy cerements of ice, and hurry down the crashing fragments into the wastes of ocean. ”

“ For hours the downpour continues, but with the coming of the rain the tempest abates, and a fresh cooling breeze refreshes man and beast and plant. Gradually the flashes become fewer and the peals of thunder less violent, the rain-spout becomes a shower, and this ends in a gentle drizzle; the sky clears, the clouds scatter, and the sun breaks forth in splendour. ”

“ You wander indefinitely in a beaded coat, wet to the skin of your legs, sit on moss-clad rocks and stumps, and hear the lisping of migrating sparrows flitting amid the shrub oaks, sit long at a time, still, and have your thoughts. A rain which is as serene as fair weather, suggesting fairer weather than was ever seen. You could hug the clods that defile you. You feel the fertilizing influence of the rain in your mind. The part of you that is wettest is fullest of life, like the lichens. ”

“ We habitually think of the rain-cloud only as dark and grey; not knowing that we owe to it perhaps the fairest, though not the most dazzling, of the hues of heaven. Often in our English mornings, the rain-clouds in the dawn form soft, level fields, which melt imperceptibly into the blue; or, when of less extent, gather into apparent bars, crossing the sheets of broader cloud above; and all these bathed throughout in an unspeakable light of pure rose-colour, and purple, and amber, and blue ”

“ SPIRIT OF RAIN (Miyanoshita, Japan, 1905)
Spirit of rain—
With all thy mountain mists that wander lonely
As a gray train
Of souls newly discarnate seeking new life only!
Spirit of rain!
Leading them thro' dim torii, up fane-ways onward
Till not in vain
They tremble upon the peaks and plunge rejoicing dawnward.
Spirit of rain!
So would I lead my dead thoughts high and higher,
Till they regain
Birth and the beauty of a new life's fire.
[Pg 130]
AUTUMN AT THE BRIDGE
Brown dropping of leaves,
Soft rush of the wind,
Slow searing of sheaves
On the hill ”

“ The magic that we call the rose.
The gentle history of the rain
Has been unfolded, traced and lost
By the sharp finger-tips of frost;
Birds in the hawthorn build again;
The hare makes soft her secret house;
The wind at tourney comes and goes,
Spurring the green, unharnessed boughs;
The moon has waxed fierce and waned dim:
He knew the beauty of all those
Last year, and who remembers him?
Love sometimes walks the waters still,
Laughter throws back her radiant head;
Utterly beauty is not gone,
And wonder is not wholly dead.
The starry, mortal world rolls on ”

“ Not the sort of spring they give us in these miserable times, under this shameless government—a mixture of east wind, blizzard, snow, rain, slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet and thunder-storms—but a sunny, blue-sky'd, joyous spring, such as we used to have regularly every year when I was a young man, and things were different. ”

“ It rains outside overhead Always, a rain that is red, And our faces are soiled with the rain. Here in the season’s despite Day-time and night-time are one, Till the curse of the kings and the chain Break, and their toils be undone. ”

“ And when therein The seeds of water so many in many ways Have come together, augmented from all sides, The close-jammed clouds then struggle to discharge Their rain-storms for a two-fold reason: lo, The wind's force crowds them, and the very excess Of storm-clouds (massed in a vaster throng) Giveth an urge and pressure from above And makes the rains out-pour. Besides when, too, The clouds are winnowed by the winds, or scattered Smitten on top by heat of sun, they send Their rainy moisture, and distil their drops, Even as the wax, by fiery warmth on top, Wasteth and liquefies abundantly. ”

“ Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled breast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain, as the end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. ”

“ Rain ... rain dripping on the roof through the long hours of night, and the weary moaning of the wakeful wind. Thronging memories of past years, past youth, past joy, past laughter echoing and re-echoing in one man’s hungry heart. Light footsteps of children never to be born ... ”

“ No use for any girl to tell herself that this was the wind howling—or the rain dejectedly descending on a tin roof—for no wind ever howled so precisely up and down scales with such sobbingly human and barnyard notes, and no rain was ever known to be so surprisingly vocal, nor so loud and threatening one moment and so tremulously broken and far away the next. ”

“ The soft wind lifts the rain-mist, flurries it, and spends
Its grief in mournful sighs, drifting from field to field,
Soaking the draggled sprays which the low hedges wield
As they labour in the wet and the load of the wind.
The last light is dimming; night comes on behind. ”

“ Even in the afternoons of the rainy season, when the clouds are banked high, there is always an iridescence to the grays—gray with red or blue or yellow or violet in it—never the dull tones of our rain-clouds. ”

“ Every rain-cloud, however fleeting, leaves its mark, not only on trees and flowers whose pulses are quickened, and on the replenished streams and lakes, but also on the rocks are its marks engraved whether we can see them or not. ”

“ But look when the drizzling rain is over, when the clouds break away, when the wind shifts around into the southwest, when the bright sun pours floods of soft, warm light upon the earth; how the grasses then lift up their beaded stalks, and shake their heads, heavy with tears ”

“ Now, however, it is different; a rainy day in autumn is so cold and disagreeable. It settles down to work in a business-like way—not like a summer shower, which has, all through, a hint of the sun behind the clouds. No, an autumn rain is chilly and gray and lasting, and the best way to forget it is to find something interesting to do indoors. ”

“ It cometh with green to gladden the plain, And to wake the sweets in the winding lane. The Rain, the Rain, the beautiful Rain, It fills the flowers to their tiniest vein, Till they rise from the sod whereon they had lain-- Ah, me! ah, me! like an army slain. The Rain, the Rain, the beautiful Rain, Each drop is a link of a diamond chain That unites the earth with its sin and its stain To the radiant realm where God doth reign. The Rain, the Rain, the beautiful Rain, Each drop is a tear not shed in vain, Which the angels weep for the golden grain All trodden to death on the gory plain ”