But when as yet the sky is serene above and the surface of the slumbering depths is just ruffled by a gentle air, there may often be heard another voice, as if some gigantic orchestra in another star was preparing for the signal to burst forth into such music as belongs not to our little planet. Fitful wailing notes in many keys, long sustained and all minor, encompass the voyager without and within. Now high, now low, but ever tending to deepen and become more massive in tone, this unearthly symphony is full of warning. It bids the watchful seaman make ready against the advent of the fast approaching storm, that, still some hundreds of leagues distant, is sending its pursuivants before its face. Nor are these spirit-stirring chords due to the harp-like obstruction offered by the web of rigging spread about the masts of a ship to the rising wind. It may be heard even more definitely in an open boat far from any ship or shore, although there, perhaps because of the great loneliness of the situation, it always seems to take a tone of deeper melancholy, as if in sympathy with the helplessness of the human creatures thus isolated from their fellows. It belongs, almost exclusively, to the extra-tropical regions where storms are many. And within a certain compass, its intimates find little variation of its scale. Always beginning in the treble clef and by regular melodic waves gradually descending until with the incidence of the storm it blends into the grand triumphal march spoken of before. But when it is heard within the tropics let the mariner beware. None can ever mistake its weird lament, sharpening every little while into a shrill scream as if impatient that its warning should be heeded without delay. It searches the very marrow of the bones, and beasts as well as men look up and are much afraid. For it is the precursor of the hurricane, before which the bravest seaman blanches, when sea and sky seem to meet and mingle, the waters that are above the firmament with the waters that are under the firmament, as in the days before God said “Let there be light.”
Far different again is the cheerful voice of the Trade wind over the laughing happy sea of those pleasant latitudes. No note of sadness or melancholy is to be detected there. Brisk and bright, confident and gay, it bids the sailor be glad in his life. Bids him mark anew how beautiful is the bright blue sea, how snowy are the billowy clouds piled peacefully around the horizon, while between them and the glittering edge of the vast circle shows a tender band of greyish green of a lucent clearness that lets the rising stars peep through as soon as they are above the horizon. Overhead through all the infinite fleckless dome eddy the friendly tones. Yet so diffused are they, so vast in their area that if one listen for them he cannot hear aright--they must be felt rather than heard. Well may their song be of content and good cheer. For they course about their ordained orbits as the healthful life tides through the human body, keeping sweet all adjacent shores and preventing by their beneficent agitation a baleful stagnation of the sea. By day the golden sun soars on his splendid road from horizon to zenith until he casts no shadow, and all the air quivers with living light, then in stately grandeur sinks through the pure serenity of that perfect scene, the guardian cumuli clustering round his goal melting apart so that, visible to the last of his blazing verge, he may go as he came, unshadowed by haze or cloud. Then, as the radiant train of lovely rays fade reluctantly from the blue concave above, all the untellable splendours of the night come forth in their changeless order, their scintillating lustre undimmed by the filmiest veil of haze. One incandescent constellation after another is revealed until, as the last faint sheen of the departing day disappears from the western horizon, the double girdle of the galaxy is flung across the darkling dome in all its wondrous beauty. And unceasingly through all the succeeding beauties of the day and night that flood of happy harmony rolls on.