The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-15 00:00:00

THERMOMETER.

This morning.
This day at Two o'clock

Barometer-30.26.
Wind—S. to S.-W.; , cloudy.

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LONDON, TUESDAY, SEPT. 15, 1863.

The clouds that are now lcoming up from all
quarters beyond the Atlantic, threatening to over-
shadow the Northern States of America with a
darkness ominous of all kinds of disaster, will be
found elsewhere most minutely enumerated and
picturesquely described by MANHATTAN. That
brilliant, but as soma cynical readers are disposed
to consider him also, flashy, correspondent of the
ld and Standard, proves himself, in this last
effective communication of his, to be not only still,
as one may call him, a genuine Yankee JUNIUS,
but, in his power of word painting, a sort of Federal
EUsKIN into the bargain. After his grotesque
fashion, he sketches in, rapidly, in a sort of MINASI
pen-and-ink drawings, a series of rolling volumes
of clouds, comparable only (in their odd way) to the
cloud-pictures pencilled in glowing colours upon so
many pages of that first wonderful book on "Modern
Painters"—the famous volume originally presented
to the scrutiny of the public, by the then unknown
JOHN RUSKIN, under the titre rather than the nom
de plume of "An Oxford Graduate." The worst of
it is, for his co-Federalists, that the clouds painted
here by MANHATTAN, are essentially different from
ail other clouds, according to the old proverb, for
inasmuch as they manifestly have no silver lining
whatever t Lurid, they are, sombre, conflicting,
charged with lightning, stored with thunderbolts,
and lowering up from all directions. The "News"
transmitted now by MANHATTAN from the seat of
war, in the midst of which he—ever vigilantly
watching, and quite frankly reporting upon the
instant, from mail to mail—is compounded from
the same diverse regions, from the initials of
which the very name of N E iv s is made,
according to the felicitous explanation of that '
problematical word, according to the old rhyming
epigrammatist :

".,vorth, East, West, South, and the solution 's made,
Each Quarter brings account of War and Trade."
Only, the accounts of War predominate now disas-
trously, as they have long done, over those of Trade
in the half serious, half sarcastic, wholly sinister
record of events compiled out yonder in North
America by that " cheil" jotting down his
notes with a stick of lunar caustic—MAN-
HATTAN ! One, whose even most hurried
scribblings are luminous, page after page,
as he writes, with a phophorence of irony almost
glittering at times into wit. Hitherto, with all his
blunt out-speaking, whatever the nature or bear-
ing of the troth he has to tell, MANHATTAN has
hardly ever assumed to himself the character of
an Alarmist. Reading him now, however, in this
his latest communication, he seems at last fairly
and honestly to come within the category. Not
applying the. phrase to him, however, with any'
sneering significance latent in it, but simply and
purely as the statement of a fact. MANHATTAN,
in truth, here does quite unmistakeably sound the
alarm. He tells his brother Federals, that the
future looks black enough before them, in whatever
direction they may look for comfort. Whether to
the Army of the Potomac, or to the assault upon
Charleston ! Whether to the calling out of the
white recruits in the North, by order of Mr. LIN-
COLN, or to the summons of the black recruits (to the
number of 500,000) in the South, by order of Mr.
DAvis ! Looking, as it were, before him and be-
hind him, to the right hand and to the left, MAN

RATTAN can;see only the dark clouds gathering, and
mustering, and lowering up: more and more threat-
eningly. Clouds, once—as with so many a tempest
while in preparation—no bigger than a man's hand!
In this instance—the hand of that great Yankee
Mr. A BaanAll
Ttlarplot, LINCOLN—in old times

a splitter of rails, now a splitter of

States asunder! Not a mere ordinary political
hair-splitter, mind ! but a render in twain of
Republics. The wonder is that with such a dis-
ruption as has taken place in the sometime United
States of America, ever since the evil hour when
Mr. LINCOLN was raised to the Presidential chair,
and was located for the customary term ter
of four
years in that \V bite House, from which he has yet
to "hail" for rather more than one year
out
of those four still remaining to him ! Within
which interval he has, alas! to play out his
little game, his wretched little losing game
of misgovernment. The wonder is to us that
with such a disruption, caused mainly by the
flagrant incapacity of Mr. LINCOLN, the rods
of the American fasces were not separated and
scattered widely apart, directly the bond of Union,
binding them for a time together, had once been
snapped! Instead of which—they are clubbed
together, all this while, in two distinct clusters—
there the States of the Federalists, there those of the
Confederates. Only with this discernable, through-
out,
upon a comparison of those belligerent powers—
that while the North, in wealth, in extent of popu-
lation, in value of commerce, in intelligence (so far
as the educated proportion of each community is
concerned), iu resources of all kinds, in maritime
armaments, and so forth, enormously surpasses the
South, the South in the long run has held its own
throughout tho war the more securely of the two