Lucius Seneca - Yale Required Reading - Collected Works (Vol. 2)

For, in addition, lo, the heat on high

Of constellated ether burdens down

Upon them, and by sort of condensation

Weaveth beneath the azure firmament

The reek of darkling cloud. It happens, too,

That hither to the skies from the Beyond

Do come those particles which make the clouds

And flying thunderheads. For I have taught

That this their number is innumerable

And infinite the sum of the Abyss,

And I have shown with what stupendous speed

Those bodies fly and how they're wont to pass

Amain through incommunicable space.

Therefore, 'tis not exceeding strange, if oft

In little time tempest and darkness cover

With bulking thunderheads hanging on high

The oceans and the lands, since everywhere

Through all the narrow tubes of yonder ether,

Yea, so to speak, through all the breathing-holes

Of the great upper-world encompassing,

There be for the primordial elements

Exits and entrances.

Now come, and how

The rainy moisture thickens into being

In the lofty clouds, and how upon the lands

'Tis then discharged in down-pour of large showers,

I will unfold. And first triumphantly

Will I persuade thee that up-rise together,

With clouds themselves, full many seeds of water

From out all things, and that they both increase—

Both clouds and water which is in the clouds—

In like proportion, as our frames increase

In like proportion with our blood, as well

As sweat or any moisture in our members.

Besides, the clouds take in from time to time

Much moisture risen from the broad marine,—

Whilst the winds bear them o'er the mighty sea,

Like hanging fleeces of white wool. Thuswise,

Even from all rivers is there lifted up

Moisture into the clouds. And when therein

The seeds of water so many in many ways

Have come together, augmented from all sides,

The close-jammed clouds then struggle to discharge

Their rain-storms for a two-fold reason: lo,

The wind's force crowds them, and the very excess

Of storm-clouds (massed in a vaster throng)

Giveth an urge and pressure from above

And makes the rains out-pour. Besides when, too,

The clouds are winnowed by the winds, or scattered

Smitten on top by heat of sun, they send

Their rainy moisture, and distil their drops,

Even as the wax, by fiery warmth on top,

Wasteth and liquefies abundantly.

But comes the violence of the bigger rains

When violently the clouds are weighted down

Both by their cumulated mass and by

The onset of the wind. And rains are wont

To endure awhile and to abide for long,

When many seeds of waters are aroused,

And clouds on clouds and racks on racks outstream

In piled layers and are borne along

From every quarter, and when all the earth

Smoking exhales her moisture. At such a time

When sun with beams amid the tempest-murk

Hath shone against the showers of black rains,

Then in the swart clouds there emerges bright

The radiance of the bow.

And as to things

Not mentioned here which of themselves do grow

Or of themselves are gendered, and all things

Which in the clouds condense to being—all,

Snow and the winds, hail and the hoar-frosts chill,

And freezing, mighty force—of lakes and pools

The mighty hardener, and mighty check

Which in the winter curbeth everywhere

The rivers as they go—'tis easy still,

Soon to discover and with mind to see

How they all happen, whereby gendered,

When once thou well hast understood just what

Functions have been vouchsafed from of old

Unto the procreant atoms of the world.

Now come, and what the law of earthquakes is

Hearken, and first of all take care to know

That the under-earth, like to the earth around us,

Is full of windy caverns all about;

And many a pool and many a grim abyss

She bears within her bosom, ay, and cliffs

And jagged scarps; and many a river, hid

Beneath her chine, rolls rapidly along

Its billows and plunging boulders. For clear fact

Requires that earth must be in every part

Alike in constitution. Therefore, earth,

With these things underneath affixed and set,

Trembleth above, jarred by big down-tumblings,

When time hath undermined the huge caves,

The subterranean. Yea, whole mountains fall,

And instantly from spot of that big jar

There quiver the tremors far and wide abroad.

And with good reason: since houses on the street

Begin to quake throughout, when jarred by a cart

Of no large weight; and, too, the furniture

Within the house up-bounds, when a paving-block

Gives either iron rim of the wheels a jolt.

It happens, too, when some prodigious bulk

Of age-worn soil is rolled from mountain slopes

Into tremendous pools of water dark,

That the reeling land itself is rocked about

By the water's undulations; as a basin

Sometimes won't come to rest until the fluid

Within it ceases to be rocked about

In random undulations.

And besides,

When subterranean winds, up-gathered there

In the hollow deeps, bulk forward from one spot,

And press with the big urge of mighty powers

Against the lofty grottos, then the earth

Bulks to that quarter whither push amain

The headlong winds. Then all the builded houses

Above ground—and the more, the higher up-reared

Unto the sky—lean ominously, careening

Into the same direction; and the beams,

Wrenched forward, over-hang, ready to go.

Yet dread men to believe that there awaits

The nature of the mighty world a time

Of doom and cataclysm, albeit they see

So great a bulk of lands to bulge and break!

And lest the winds blew back again, no force

Could rein things in nor hold from sure career

On to disaster. But now because those winds

Blow back and forth in alternation strong,

And, so to say, rallying charge again,

And then repulsed retreat, on this account

Earth oftener threatens than she brings to pass

Collapses dire. For to one side she leans,

Then back she sways; and after tottering

Forward, recovers then her seats of poise.

Thus, this is why whole houses rock, the roofs

More than the middle stories, middle more

Than lowest, and the lowest least of all.

Arises, too, this same great earth-quaking,

When wind and some prodigious force of air,

Collected from without or down within

The old telluric deeps, have hurled themselves

Amain into those caverns sub-terrene,

And there at first tumultuously chafe

Among the vasty grottos, borne about

In mad rotations, till their lashed force

Aroused out-bursts abroad, and then and there,

Riving the deep earth, makes a mighty chasm—

What once in Syrian Sidon did befall,

And once in Peloponnesian Aegium,

Twain cities which such out-break of wild air

And earth's convulsion, following hard upon,

O'erthrew of old. And many a walled town,

Besides, hath fall'n by such omnipotent

Convulsions on the land, and in the sea

Engulfed hath sunken many a city down

With all its populace. But if, indeed,

They burst not forth, yet is the very rush

Of the wild air and fury-force of wind

Then dissipated, like an ague-fit,

Through the innumerable pores of earth,

To set her all a-shake—even as a chill,

When it hath gone into our marrow-bones,

Sets us convulsively, despite ourselves,

A-shivering and a-shaking. Therefore, men

With two-fold terror bustle in alarm