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Updated: June 27, 2025
Over Soracte rises the sun, over his own beloved mountain; though no longer worshipped there, asof old. Before him, the antique house, where Raphael lived, casts its long, brown shadow down into the heart of modern Rome. The city lies still asleep and silent. But above its dark roofs, more than two hundred steeples catch the sunshine on their gilded weather-cocks.
Here, patent contrivances act the purpose of weather-cocks, swaying to and fro with the wind; there, others stand as fixed as if, by a sic jubeo, they had settled the business. But of all those houses that in the street one passes by, unsuspicious of what's the matter within, there is not one in a hundred but what there has been the devil to do to cure the chimneys of smoking!
Nearly all the past week they had been whirling briskly: now, being rather out of breath, they rocked lazily in the clear, still air. Catch a windmill working when the weather-cocks have nothing to do! There was an end to grinding, crushing, and sawing for that day. It was a good thing for the millers near Broek. Long before noon, they concluded to take in their sails, and go to the race.
Their impulse was well-nigh to prostrate themselves in lamentation before untimely rains and tempests, which came as the Alastor of those households whose crime it was to be poor. After midsummer they watched the weather-cocks as men waiting in antechambers watch the lackey. Sun elated them; quiet rain sobered them; weeks of watery tempest stupefied them.
The villa of the Lust in Rust was a low, irregular edifice, in bricks, whitewashed to the color of the driven snow, and in a taste that was altogether Dutch. There were many gables and weather-cocks, a dozen small and twisted chimneys, with numberless facilities that were intended for the nests of storks.
It was not until the return of peace, when this belligerent neighborhood once more resumed its quiet agricultural pursuits, that the stout Jacob sought the scene of his triumphs and disasters; rebuilt the Roost, and reared again on high its glittering weather-cocks. Does any one want further particulars of the fortunes of this eventful little pile?
Many of the big houses in Castro boast a large 'scutcheon over the door, little crazy towers with iron weather-cocks on the roof; and some of them a huge stork's nest. The streets remote from the centre of town have no paving, and their houses are low, built of adobe, and continued by yards, over whose mud-walls appear the branches of fig-trees.
Communipaw, therefore, may truly be called the parent of New-York; yet it is an astonishing fact, that though immediately opposite to the great city it has produced, from whence its red roofs and tin weather-cocks can actually be descried peering above the surrounding apple orchards, it should be almost as rarely visited, and as little known by the inhabitants of the metropolis, as if it had been locked up among the Rocky Mountains.
For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
This latter bore, and still bears, the initials of Frederick Filipsen, and assumed great airs in consequence. The usual contradiction ensued that always exists among church weather-cocks, which can never be brought to agree as to the point from which the wind blows, having doubtless acquired, from their position, the Christian propensity to schism and controversy.
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