By GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND.

As nations rise in wealth, comfort and communications, they discover that the simplest of all things, mere climate or air, is of the greatest value. The English race paid early attention to this question and seized upon the sheltered positions, the spas and baths as places of resort both for weak systems and for luxurious existence. Religion itself conveniently placed its miracles and chapels where the best climate or the most healing waters were found.

Soon after America was discovered there spread through the most successful nations a belief in a Golden Spring, an El Dorado, and this was pursued notably in Florida, where many yet believe that the most golden spring is to be found, as its season hardly begins till February or March, and is used to offset a lingering winter and the angry winds of the northern sea coast country.

One of the most notable instances of seeking a climate in our colonial history is that of Sir William Johnson, who lived among the six nations of Indians about the Mohawk, and being a portly man with European habits of life, he found his old age, in spite of his active and military youth, affected by gouts and by the heavy stagnant air of the limestone valleys in which he lived, and he was one of the first Americans to select at once a seacoast resort and the mineral springs. We need not repeat the story of how the Indians, among whom he married, concluded in their affection for him to show him their celebrated mineral spring, and took him on a litter through hidden paths to the Tufa rock of Saratoga, where he, the first of white men, saw the reflection of his face in the meteoric water there. It is not as well known that Sir William Johnson also made himself a road to the sea beach, near New London, where he went in summer, not for mineral water, but for sea air, which he esteemed so much more valuable.

Climate, indeed, is one of the most important subjects to be considered by superior men, and the earliest travelers in this country noted down where they escaped the insects, where the nights were cool, where the trade winds blew, etc. The oranges of Florida, for instance, were noted by the old Spanish chroniclers as the finest that grew in their immense dominions, and that perfection is kept up to the present time.

General Washington, a man of good condition, was one of the early annual seekers for a pleasant climate, which he found west of the North Mountain, about Berkeley Springs, where he had a hut built, and for years repaired there with his chicken cocks and horses. When he went through Virginia as a young surveyor, he observed the differences in the temperature, and in the humidity, and located some of the best springs and resorts in the Old Dominion. When Washington first visited Saratoga he endeavored, at once, to purchase the tract enclosing the few sources at that time known, so much was he impressed with the superiority of the climate of New York in summer over that of Virginia.

Mr. Jefferson, who was one of the best amateurs in the country at all sorts of subjects, although he lived on the top of a mountain above the tidewater region, and in sight of other peaks, would not spend his summers at home about Charlottsville, but had a road cut far into the west and built himself a sort of lodge called Poplar Forest, in the high country about Lynchburgh; it was a brick house on a slope, one story high in front and two stories high in the rear, of octagon shape, with a portico in front and a veranda in the rear. To this spot Jefferson went both in summer and in autumn to escape his political followers, and to think, read and sleep.

Jefferson was one of the earliest weather prophets in this country and in his works are found many references to the American climate, of use to any future climatologist. About 1805 he wrote to Mr. Volney, the philosopher: “In no case does habit attach our choice or judgment more than in climate. The Canadian glows with delight in his sleigh and snow, the very idea of which gives me the shivers. The changes between heat and cold in America are greater and more frequent, and the extremes comprehend a greater scale on the thermometer in America than in Europe. Habit, however, prevents these from affecting us more than the smaller changes of Europe affect the European, but he is greatly affected by ours. As our sky is always clear and that of Europe always cloudy, there is a greater accumulation of heat here than there in the same parallel. The changes between wet and dry are much more frequent and sudden in Europe than in America, for though we have double the rain, it falls in half the time. Taking all these together, I prefer much the climate of the United States to that of Europe, and I think it a more cheerful one. It is our cloudless sky which has eradicated from our constitutions all disposition to hang ourselves, which we might otherwise have inherited from our English ancestors. Still, I do not wonder that a European should prefer his grey to our azure sky.”

This description in the main holds good to our time, although social causes have increased here the tendency to suicide, though perhaps the ratio of suicide is no greater in America now than it ever was. If we add dueling, which was a form of suicide, to the regular cases of suicide, I have my doubts whether more Americans make away with themselves now than in the early days. I happen to think of one signer of the Declaration of Independence who died from mental excitement over signing that instrument, of another who was poisoned, and of a third who was killed by a fellow patriot in a duel.

Jefferson also noted in 1809, under “Cultivation,” the changes in the American climate, in a letter to Dr. Chapman: “I remember,” said he, “that when I was a small boy, say sixty years ago, snows were frequent and deep in every winter, to my knee very often, to my waist sometimes, and that they covered the earth long. And I remember while yet young to have heard from very old men that in their youth the winters had been still colder, with deeper and longer snows. In the year 1772 we had a snow two feet deep in the Champagne parts of this state, and three feet in the counties next below the mountains. But when I was President the average fall of snow for the seven winters was only 14½ inches, and the ground was covered but sixteen days in each winter on an average of the whole. I noticed the change in our climate in my ‘Notes on Virginia,’ but since that time public vocations have taken my attention from the subject, nor do I know of any source in Virginia now existing, from which anything on climate can be derived. Dr. Williamson has written on the subject, and Mr. Williams in his ‘History of Vermont’ has an essay on the subject of climate.”

Addressing Mr. Louis E. Beck at Albany, N. Y., in 1824, when he was a very old man, Jefferson said:

“I thank you for your pamphlet on the climate of the West; although it does not yet establish a satisfactory theory, it is an additional step toward it. My own was perhaps the first attempt to bring together the few facts then known, and suggest them to public attention, and they were written before the close of the revolutionary war, when the western country was a wilderness untrodden but by the feet of the savage or the hunter. It is now flourishing in population and science, and after a few more years of observation and collection of facts, they will doubtless furnish a theory of their climate. Years are requisite for this, steady attention to the thermometer, to the plants growing there, the times of their leafing and flowering, its prevalent winds, quantities of rain and snow, temperature of fountains, animal inhabitants, etc. We want this, indeed, for all the states, and the work should be repeated once or twice in a century to show the effects of clearing and culture toward changes of climate.”

Thus promptly did our early scholars and sages watch the climatic relations of the country to its population and vitality. These “Notes on Virginia,” which Jefferson wrote during the Revolution, contain five years’ instrumental observation on rain, heat and wind taken at Williamsburgh, the tidewater capital, which is about forty miles from Fortress Monroe, which latter place has since become a winter resort. He computed that we had forty-seven inches of rain annually, considerably more than fell in Europe, but a much larger proportion of sunshine than there, only half as many cloudy days as in France and Germany, and the statesman says about the Alleghany Mountain region, of which Chautauqua Lake is an outpost:

“It is remarkable that proceeding on the same parallel of latitude westerly, the climate becomes colder in like manner as when you proceed northerly. This continues to be the case until you attain the summit of the Alleghany, which is the highest land between the ocean and the Mississippi. From thence, descending in the same latitude to the Mississippi, the change reverses, and, if we may believe travelers, it becomes warmer there than it is on the same latitude on the sea side. On the higher parts of mountains, where it is absolutely colder than it is on the plains on which they stand, frosts do not appear so early by a considerable time in autumn, and go off sooner in the spring than on the plains. I have known frost so severe as to kill the hickory trees round about Monticello, and yet not injure the tender fruit blossoms then in bloom on the top and higher parts of the mountain. A change in our climate is taking place very sensibly, and both heats and colds are becoming much more moderate, within the memory even of the middle-aged.”

General Washington, it may not be generally known, kept all his early diaries on the blank leaves of the “Virginia Almanac,” which was printed at Williamsburgh, showing that he watched the weather as if it were a part of public life.

Washington came to the vicinity of Chautauqua Lake in 1753, when he was scarcely of age, and this journey makes his earliest diary. He went from Williamsburgh to Fredericksburgh, thence to Alexandria, thence to Winchester in the valley of Virginia, thence to Cumberland, Maryland, and down the Monongahela River and up the Alleghany to French Creek, or the Venango. All the land was then a wilderness. Washington reported from hearsay, at Venango, that there were four forts, the first of them on French Creek near a small lake, the next on Lake Erie about 15 miles from the other, from which it was 120 miles to the fort at the falls of Lake Erie. From the fort on Lake Erie to Montreal was about 600 miles, which the French only required four weeks to traverse in good weather. Washington noted the good land about Venango and the extensive and rich meadows, one of which was four miles in length. When Washington was interested in connecting Lake Erie with the waters of the Ohio by a canal, he was very explicit in addressing General William Irvine about the climate traits of Chautauqua Lake; this General Irvine was a doctor born in Ireland and settled at Carlisle, Pa., and he was among the first men to understand the climate of Lake Erie, and he managed to get for Pennsylvania a frontage on this lake.

In the pursuit of climate, it is probable that the first movements were made by the people of the populous states of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Any one who possesses a library of travels in America, conveying successive pictures of our social life from colonial times down to the day of railroads, will discover numbers of perished watering places.

For instance, about the time of the Revolution, the chief summer resorts in Pennsylvania were about York, as at York Springs, and I possess pictures of old log hotels at some of these resorts, where the outspurs of the Blue Mountains gave a little altitude above the surrounding plains. The wounded soldiers in the Revolution were sent up to Ephrata and Litiz and Bethlehem, where the air was good and nurses were to be had.

These Blue Mountains were not ascended until 1716, when Governor Spotiswood of Virginia undertook to find where the rivers of that state had their fountains, and he took an ensign in the British army and went to the frontier, where he was joined by some gentlemen and some militia rangers, about fifty in all, with pack-horses and much liquor, and this little army started out from near the site of the battle of Chancellorsville, and it took them a week to get to the top of the Blue Ridge at Swift Run Gap, thirty-six days after the Governor had left Williamsburgh. They went down into the Shenandoah Valley and called that flowing river the Euphrates. So much delighted was Spotiswood with the air and scenery of the mountains that he instituted an order of knighthood called the Tramontane order.

Such was the beginning of human knowledge of the Alleghanies, nearly 170 years ago. The lives of three not very old men would have spanned from that day to this. The nearest approach of that Alleghany range, of which the Blue Ridge was the first parallel, to the great interior lakes of North America, is at Chautauqua. At this lake the Alleghany ridge, which divides the sources of the Ohio valley from the great lakes, is between 800 and 1400 feet high, every hill arable, and the earliest settlers observed how quickly the apples, pears and plums succeeded in the mild climate. They were surprised to find, at an altitude of more than 1300 feet above the ocean, a noble sheet of water 20 miles long. Some of the earliest settlers in this region came from the Blue Mountain country, buying their land from the Holland Land Company of New York, of which William H. Seward was long the attorney. Some of the first settlers pitched their cabins about 1803.

It is understood that Chautauqua Lake was first navigated about 1782, when the Revolutionary war was almost done and the battle of Yorktown had been fought. Desirous of keeping up some show of hostility, about 1800 British and Indians were sent to recapture Pittsburgh, and they launched their canoes on this lake, but their spies came back and told them that the Americans were on the lookout. Earlier than this, about 1752, when the French resolved to seize on the head waters of the Ohio, they left Niagara Fort by water in April and got to a place they called Chadacoin (undoubtedly Chautauqua) on Lake Erie, where they began to cut timber and prepared to build a fort, but their engineer coming on afterward put a stop to it, saying that the Chautauqua River was too shallow to carry out any craft with provisions to the Ohio. The man who had begun building the fort, M. Babeer, was so much pleased with the spot that he insisted on continuing his work, and he demanded that his opponent give him a certificate to excuse himself to the governor for not selecting so good a place. Consequently the fort was built at Erie, or Presqu’Ile.

The region about Chautauqua Lake is therefore, in an imperial sense, the oldest in America, the neighborhood for which two great empires contended, and at the time the French were meditating the seizure of these high lands and water-courses, twelve Virginians, two of whom were named Washington, formed the Ohio Company, before the year 1750.

Thus a third of a century only elapsed between the discovery of the Blue Ridge and the enterprises to connect the Alleghanies and the lakes on the part of two distinguished nations.

The high lands and hills about Chautauqua were familiar objects to the subjects of Louis XV. on their way to meet the adolescent Washington, and young Jumondville, who fell before Washington’s night assault, had cooled his fevered eyes on the green forests of the Chautauqua summits. In forty-six years more, old General Wayne, who used this region as the base of observations against the Indians of Michigan and Ohio, closed his eyes almost within sight of the Chautauqua hillocks, and, while his body was still lying in the fort where he breathed his last, Commodore Perry was building a crude navy to sweep Lake Erie of the British. Perry came through New York state to Lake Ontario, from thence went to Buffalo and took a sleigh on the ice for Erie, also passing within sight of the high knobs of Chautauqua. Several of his vessels went from the region of Buffalo, and at the age of twenty-seven this young officer won a fame hardly surpassed in the naval history of the New World.

The influence of the lake and western climate on the seamen and soldiers who visited it was almost immediately seen in their location hereabout and settling of many towns on the southern shore of Lake Erie, and if both sides of this lake were American, there seems to be little doubt that it would now be approaching the time of being the greatest center of population in the New World. That center has been driven down the hot Ohio valley by the limitations of our boundary, which giving not American soil to the north of Lake Erie, has reluctantly abandoned the cool summer air and clear fine winters of the lakes for the hot limestone inclosures of the streams to the south.

Yet the present growth of towns along Lake Erie shows with what alacrity the populations of the lower West precipitate themselves against the shores of the lake. Cleveland is growing faster than Cincinnati. Detroit, long retarded by a habitant population, is growing faster than Louisville. Toledo is growing faster than Wheeling. Buffalo has almost outgrown its more ancient neighbor of Pittsburgh. Chicago and Milwaukee stride ahead of St. Louis and Memphis. When the summer comes and the great national conventions choose their places of meeting, they benefit by experience, and both assemble the same year at Chicago to get the air of the lakes instead of sweltering in St. Louis or Cincinnati.

The fine climate about Chautauqua is in much a matter of altitude. Proceeding either east or west from this point, the shores of the lakes lie comparatively flat, and in the state of Ohio there is but one eminence sufficient to be called a mountain, and that is the Little Mountain not far from Painesville, a mere knob only about 200 feet above the plain, and ten miles back from Lake Erie. Even here some comfort can be had by the inhabitants of the plain, and a hotel was built at least fifty years ago.

The rise of public biography on the southern shore of Lake Erie has not been overlooked by the general reader; Garfield, Giddings, Wade, General McPherson, Hon. Henry B. Payne, Governor Todd, William Howells, Chief Justice Waite and many others are among the men whose minds have been lifted by the breezes from the lake, and which have already begun to display an energizing character attracting the attention of the whole country.

It has only been eighty-eight years since the first surveyors landed at Conneaut to survey the military lands of Connecticut and organize northern Ohio. When they pulled their boats ashore, which they had taken from Buffalo up the lake, they were so touched with their improved health that they moored on the beach, had prayer together and resolved to make the first day in the West a holiday. Mr. Harvey Rice in his recent history of the Western Reserve says: “The day was remarkably pleasant and the air bracing, and they partook of an extemporized feast with a keen relish, and gave for one of the toasts, ‘May these fifty sons and daughters multiply in sixteen years sixteen times fifty.’” Seven weeks after this picnic the site of Cleveland was selected for a city. Twenty-two years after that the first steamboat starting from Buffalo passed within sight of Chautauqua and entered the harbor of Cleveland and went on to Detroit.

I have been almost an extensive traveler in the United States, not like commercial travelers, merely visiting the towns and trading points, but the scenery and the health resorts. About twenty-four years ago I went on the press and the vocation of special correspondent was then just rising into consideration, and I threw myself toward it, desiring to gratify “the lust of the eye” by my newspaper facilities. Even before I left school I had tramped through the Alleghany mountains, through the Sinking Spring valley, the Seven mountains and the fountain town called Bellefonte, in the heart of the Alleghanies. Next I went through the Lackawanna and Wyoming valleys, visited the old resorts in the lap of Pennsylvania under the Blue Mountains, and in the midst of the war was a battle correspondent at such places as the Fauquier White Sulphur Springs. Next, lecturing opportunities took me through New York state and the West, and I visited Fredonia twice, in the vicinity of Chautauqua Lake, and there heard of the beautiful region almost overhanging it, on the highlands. With renewed opportunities I have been in California, about Los Angeles, and at Santa Barbara, and in southern Georgia and Florida, and in Cuba, at the Hot Springs of Arkansas, on the summits of the Osage mountains where the trade wind blows, at Springfield and through the Indian territory, and at San Antonio, in Texas, with smaller journeys to Oaklands and the Green Brier White Sulphur Springs, on the Alleghany tops and the Peaks of Otter, and along all our coasts as far as Mount Desert and New Brunswick, and several times in the White Mountains, down the St. Lawrence to the sea and out the Northern Pacific railroad, and I miss no opportunity, when I can afford it, to extend my information of places and people.

This is only said in answer to your request to give some idea of the relative quality of the air about Chautauqua Lake. I have seen no place where the air is so pure and the nights so agreeable anywhere along our lakes, and the spot seems almost arranged by nature with a reference to the anticipated arrangement of the people and the lines of communication in this republic.

When you consider that the low grade railroad route to the West must turn the Alleghany mountains to the North and use the limited space between those mountain spurs and the lake to reach the West without unnecessary expenditure of steam power, it would seem that Chautauqua Lake had been adjusted to the coming lines of travel, and we already have the Lake Shore, the Nickel Plate, the Erie, and the different Alleghany River lines, with more lines soon to come, to connect the Lehigh, the Lackawanna, the West Shore, and kindred systems with the great West.

Surely the spot is most agreeable for health and enjoyment to the great homogeneous people who are nearly evenly divided in numbers by the Alleghany range. The Alleghany mountains have hardly commenced their material development, and being full of coal, oil, iron, and the more precious minerals, the time is approaching when that mountain range will contain on its slopes the densest population in America, and its mineral resources be worked from the vicinity of Buffalo to Alabama.

My brother, Doctor Ralph M. Townsend, who was a surgeon connected with the medical schools of Philadelphia, and also a writer, was taken ill about ten years ago and compelled to search up and down the world for a climate in which to live. He tried Algiers, the south of France, the Bahamas, the Bermudas, Central America, Lower California, Colorado, and finally died in the Adirondack mountains, which he thought might allow him, in the dry air, to safely winter there. He did not like Florida, thought it was too damp, considered the southern part of California to be subject to winds, took cold in Colorado, which hastened his death, and finally considered that the northern climates were the most reliable. His vital power was almost spent when he came to this conclusion.

I was recently talking to General Pike Graham, a retired officer of the United States army and a native of Virginia, about the relative climate of Europe and America. He said that he had spent within a very few years three full winters abroad, and had tried almost all the resorts in the South of Europe, and he considered that the United States was much better situated for climate. He did not think Florida was a good climate, being too low and subject to changes and to dampness, but regarded southwestern Texas as perhaps the best he knew. I haw talked to other travelers who consider the City of Mexico to have the best air they know of on the continent.

It is of advantage to an invalid to have a resort from which the surrounding world of men is attainable. That accounts for Fortress Monroe in the winter, with probably an inferior climate, absorbing much of the best travel to Florida. It is softer than any indentation to the north of the Chesapeake, and can be reached by a husband, or brother, or wife, from any of the great centers of the North in a very little time. The same is the case with Chautauqua Lake; it is only a night from the East, and a night and a day from the far West. A large portion of the American people can visit it without taking rail at all, using the steam lines on the St. Lawrence and the great lakes. It is especially a summer climate and the foliage of western New York in the autumns is not equaled on the globe, at least not in the temperate zones. The finest autumn tints I ever recollect to have seen are in western New York, where the character of the trees assimilates to the ardor of the foliage, and the maples and poplars almost imitate the finery of the Indians who once dwelt in their region.

The Western States do not possess the variety of the East in coasts, hills, spas, and scenery; much of the Mississippi valley is limestone hill or flat plain, bare of mountains, and the first cool and lovely spot reached from the West is on the lofty headwaters of the Ohio, near Lake Erie. Following the Lake Shore to the westward I do not know of a single spot to be found like Chautauqua, though one should go as far as Duluth, where I have been also in the time of its prosperity, about 1872; the heat at Duluth, though so much farther to the north, was much greater in midsummer than it is on the Chautauqua uplands. Indeed, the heat of the American summer penetrates almost every resort, and I have known at Saratoga some of the most stagnant days of my life. A perfectly cool climate is not obtained along our coasts till one gets to New Brunswick, about St. John, and the coolness there has the drawback of heavy fogs and a moisture exceeding Ireland.

My brother, already referred to, possessed more special intelligence on this subject than myself, and at the commencement of his sickness he began a series of letters to the Medical and Surgical Reporter, where I read at the outstart this sentence: “My languor and lassitude from May until July was followed by a slight attack of laryngitis. I grew thinner daily. A week in July at the high, dry country estate of a friend did bring some increased strength and appetite, but a second week at Cape May brought on a severe attack of bronchitis. Recovering partly from this, two weeks were spent at Saratoga and Lake George with the effect of again bringing me home with a bronchial attack, and the last straw was finally attained by taking my boy to Atlantic City for his health. I had hardly come within smell of the salt marshes at this place when my bronchial trouble was brought back with redoubled intensity.”

He goes on to say that his doctor, Professor Da Costa, ordered him to find a new climate at once, as a deposit had already made its appearance in both lungs. This was just ten years ago, and in the month of October, he says: “Of the many different medical friends who came to say good-bye and add hearty wishes for my recovery, scarcely two united on the same place as the one best suited for me to go to.”

My brother’s letters, continued for several months and written just before his death, grappled with the question of a climate after severe experience. He found Mentone “the most crowded of all places with invalids, and the least deserving of patronage of any place long the Riviera.” “If you get into a carriage in front of a hotel on a beautiful sunshiny day you protest against taking an overcoat in the absolute heat, but when you turn a corner into a shady street or get on the shady side of a wall or hill and let the sun be temporarily obscured, you must quickly draw close your overcoat and pull a robe over your lap. I do not recommend Nice as a winter climate except by comparison, and I would never halt on the north shore of the Mediterranean if it were in my power to reach Egypt or Algeria.”

He kept a diary, wherever he went, of the condition of the weather, and Europe is almost invariably written “cloudy,” “chilly,” “raw,” “showery,” or “rain.” He thought much better of Algiers, where he stayed fifty-nine days, but how few persons can afford to go to Algiers—“and even there,” he says, “ten days were partially or wholly cloudy, and on eleven days we had continuous rains or showers, one of the rainy days being characterized by a smart hail storm.” This was between January and March.

Santa Barbara is probably the best indorsed wintering place on the coast of California. I went ashore there from a ship, and found a small town, partly of frame houses and partly of Mexican huts, with a dull mongrel life, hardly relieved by an old mission house a mile or so in the rear of the town; the invalids looked like banished people, and had then such infrequent access to the outer world that their eyes seemed yearning toward their homes in Chicago or elsewhere. The element of society and of change and life is more necessary than medicine to a desponding and invalid nature. That is the great trouble with the majority of American resorts, which are neither large enough to accommodate the crowd in the high season, nor near enough to the channels of travel in any season. There can not be, for example, a more wretched place than the Hot Springs of Arkansas, even in the height of the season, which is in late winter and spring; the close ragged valley with a sewer running through the middle of it, alternately a stench and deluge, and the series of raveled hotels wherein gambling is the chief occupation, where the rain is frequent and at times seems constant, and the natural life of the place is hard and outlaw like, and it takes about twenty-four hours to get anywhere in the current of mankind.

San Antonio, which has a good climate, has not a hotel fit for a person to inhabit who is acquainted with the comforts of the table. Though situated considerably inland, it is subject to what are called “northers,” or cold storms, that often bring hail, and advance upon the place with the rapidity of a spirit of ice and snow. Almost all those southern resorts are too warm for summer tourists, and this is the case at the Green Brier Sulphur Springs, notwithstanding its high altitude; the nights are cold, but mid-day is often exhausting.

About Oakland, in Maryland, is a cool climate, and the summit there has become something similar to Chautauqua Lake, having groups of hotels about six miles apart, and between them in the glades is a kind of religious camp settlement.

The interior of New York state, as at Cooperstown, is agreeable in the nights, but the limestone soil retains a portion of its heat and the days are often sultry.

The White Mountains have the disadvantage of remoteness from any considerable centers of population and are not upon the main highways of travel. It takes a whole day to go to the mountains from Boston, and many of the resorts there are distant from the railroad, and must be reached by livery teams, which slowly climb to the altitudes, and affect the patience and also increase the cost of living. The days are often very cold. I was in the White Mountains last summer, and undertook to walk from my hotel down to the village of Franconia, in plain sight. I generally found that the heat spoiled my linen and brought me back to the hotel used up.

For my own part I am fully persuaded that the most powerful goddess, and one that rules mankind with the most authoritative sway is Truth. For though she is resisted by all, and ofttimes has drawn up against her the plausibilities of falsehood in the subtlest forms, she triumphs over all opposition. I know not how it is that she, by her own unadorned charms, forces herself into the heart of man. At times her power is instantly felt; at other times, though obscured for awhile, she at last bursts forth in meridian splendor, and conquers by her innate force the falsehood with which she has been oppressed.—Polybius.