YOU can spot a literary classic, according to some experts, by the poetic quality of its opening lines. There are many familiar examples: Tolstoy's "All happy families are more or less alike . . ."; Du Maurier's "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again"; and Longtemps je suis couche de bonne heure - Proust's admission that "For a long time I used to go to bed early."
Other authors, of course, have more startling ways of grabbing our attention. Perhaps the most celebrated in this latter category are the memoirs of Harriette Wilson, whose approaches to the Duke of Wellington met famously with the challenge "Publish and be damned"; and so she did, beginning: "I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven."
Meteorologists, however, have different criteria of literary merit. They tend, in a quasi-adolescent search for the meteorologically salacious, to flick through every publication in search of references to weather. Very rarely are they disappointed.
Jules Verne, for example, in one of his lesser known works called Le Rayon Vert or "The Green Ray", has one of his characters describe a rare optical phenomenon: "Have you sometimes observed the sun setting over the sea? Have you watched it till the upper rim of its disc, skimming the surface of the water, is just about to disappear?
"And have you noticed the singular phenomenon which occurs at the very instant the heavenly body sends forth its final sunbeam? It is a ray of unparalleled purity, a ray of the most wonderful green which no artist could ever obtain upon his palette, and which neither the varied tints of vegetation nor the shades of the most limpid sea could ever reproduce! If there be green in Paradise, it cannot but be this".
Shakespeare, too, provides rich weather pickings - sending the early-rising lovelorn Romeo, for example, on a walk down the dewy street where Juliet lived:
Many a morning hath he there been seen,
With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew
Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs.
If little snippets of this kind appeal to you, so too may a new publication by The Irish Times which hit the streets just yesterday. Its theme is literary excerpts that have suggested topics for this page over the years, have been used to illustrate a point, or have, perhaps, just provided a nicely vivid description of some weather happening.