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Nor are such foolish opinions and customs yet banished from the world. Comets, too, with their blazing tails, were long regarded, and still are by many, as harbingers of divine vengeance, presaging famines and inundations, or the downfall of princes and the destruction of empires.
Many ships which had been detained in the North Sea by the east wind were approaching the city, with their various colored flags floating on the breeze, while, far as the eye could reach, the broad expanse of water was covered with sails, and still, in the dim horizon, mast after mast seemed to arise from the waves as harbingers of an immense flotilla.
The inhabitants of this place affirm, that of late years the sea has driven so vehemently upon them, that they have lost above four leagues of land. These sands are her harbingers: and we now see great heaps of moving sand, that march half a league before her, and occupy the land.
He whom, his nature, his education, his reflections, his habits, have rendered susceptible of these dispositions, and to whom his circumstances have given him the faculty of gratifying them, becomes an interesting object to all those who approach him: he enjoys every instant, he reads with satisfaction the contentment, he contemplates with pleasure the joy which he has diffused over all countenances: his wife, his children, his friends, his servants greet him with gay, serene faces, indicative of that content, harbingers of that peace, which he recognizes for his own work: every thing that environs him is ready to partake his pleasures; to share his pains; cherished, respected, looked up to by others, every thing conducts him to agreeable reflections; he knows the rights he has acquired over their hearts; he applauds himself for being the source of a felicity that captivates all the world; his own condition, his sentiments of self-love, become an hundred times more delicious when he sees them participated by all those with whom his destiny has connected him.
The sky was as clear and blue as on any other fine day; but over the sea to the north lay a light stratum of clouds the harbingers perhaps of the appalling blackness which the god would presently bring up against his enemies.
There passed also an occasional flock of geese, cheerful harbingers of spring, and the prairie-chickens had set up their morning symphony, wide-swelling, wonderful with its prophecy of the new birth of grass and grain and the springing life of all breathing things. The crow passed now and then, uttering his resonant croak, but the crane had not yet sent forth his bugle note.
The gun thunder beyond Nivelle had ceased; an intense stillness reigned in the forest; only a leaf moved here and there on the aspens. A few forest flies whirled about her, but as yet no ominous green flies came none of those jewelled harbingers of death which appear with horrible promptness and as though by magic from nowhere when anything dies in the open world.
The shrubs and trees are decked more or less with young fresh leaves at all times, while the ground is strewn with those in a state of decay which have ripened and faded out of life. The latter with us are the harbingers of winter, the former coming only with the opening spring.
"We will hope that this superior being may not appear only too soon," replied the Emperor, smiling bitterly. "The invincible oppressor bears the name of unexpected circumstances; I encountered one of his harbingers to-day. There lie the documents. Do you know to what those miserable papers force me, the Emperor? ay, force, I repeat it.
Then, with or without a confession, he would slip back into the obscurity he came from. While he worked the soft wind rioted about him, and the harbingers of summer passed north in battalions overhead crane, brant-goose, and mallard, in crescents, skeins, and wedges, after the fashion of their kind.
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