The Breaking of the Storm by Friedrich Spielhagen

Autumn had come, and was boisterously asserting his authority; the weather was dark and gloomy, even in Reinhold's eyes. "The gloomiest and darkest I ever experienced," he said each morning to himself as the same spectacle always presented itself when he opened his window: dark, lowering clouds, trees swaying to and fro, from whose branches blustering winds were stripping the brown leaves and whirling them through the moist, foggy atmosphere across the roofs of the workshops, which looked so drenched and miserable that one would only have expected tombstones to be made there.

"And yet I have got through darker and gloomier days without losing heart," philosophised Reinhold further; "it is not the weather out of doors, it is that whichever way I turn I see people in need and trouble, as if I were on board a ship that must sink shortly and could do nothing to save it, but must sit with my hands before me, and look on idly at the catastrophe."