Adela Cathcart. Volume II by George MacDonald

As I led Adela, well wrapped in furs, down the steps to put her into the / carriage, I felt by the wind, and saw by the sky, that a snowstorm was / at hand. This set my heart beating with delight, for after all I am only / what my friends call me -- an old boy; and so I am still very fond of snow / and wind. Of course this pleasure is often modified by the recollection / that it is to most people no pleasure, and to some a source of great / suffering. But then I recover myself by thinking, that I did not send / for the snow, and that my enjoyment of it will neither increase their / pains nor lessen my sympathies. And so I enjoy it again with all my / heart. It is partly the sense of being lapt in a mysterious fluctuating / depth of exquisite shapes of evanescent matter, falling like a cataract / from an unknown airy gulf, where they grow into being and form out of / the invisible -- well-named by the prophet Job -- for a prophet he was in / the truest sense, all-seated in his ashes and armed with his / potsherd -- the womb of the snow; partly the sense of motion and the / goings of the wind through the etherial mass; partly the delight that / always comes from contest with nature, a contest in which no vile / passions are aroused, and no weak enemy goes helpless to the ground.

I presume that in a right condition of our nervous nature, instead of our / being, as some would tell us, less exposed to the influences of nature, / we should in fact be altogether open to them. Our nerves would be a / thorough-fare for Nature in all and each of her moods and feelings, / stormy or peaceful, sunshiny or sad. The true refuge from the slavery to / which this would expose us, the subjection of man to circumstance, is to / be found, not in the deadening of the nervous constitution, or in a / struggle with the influences themselves, but in the strengthening of the / moral and refining of the spiritual nature; so that, as the storms rave / through the vault of heaven without breaking its strong arches with / their winds, or staining its etherial blue with their rain-clouds, the / soul of man should keep clear and steady and great, holding within it / its own feelings and even passions, knowing that, let them moan or rave / as they will, they cannot touch the nearest verge of the empyrean dome, / in whose region they have their birth and being.