'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist.
[V]ariety of climate should always go with stability of abode.... an Englishman’s house is not only his castle; it is his fairy castle. Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve are perpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold to ivory. There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden which is literally different on every one of the three hundred and sixty-five days. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far as a faint and fiery evening cloud.
. . . it is impossible you should take true root but by the fair weather that you make yourself it is needful that you frame the season of your own harvest.
There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather... In the spring I have counted one hundred and twenty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.
When any of the four pillars of government-religion, justice, counsel, and treasure-are mainly shaken or weakened, men had need to pray for fair weather.
There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.
Then was I as a tree whose boughs did bend with fruit; but in one night, a storm or robbery, call it what you will, shook down my mellow hangings, nay, my leaves, and left me bare to weather.
WEATHER, n. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.