Enough, then, of apologies and negative considerations. There was never a good Yankee, of moderately robust health, and under fifty years of age, that did not welcome cold weather as a friend. Ask the school-boys, especially such as live in country places, whether summer or winter brings the greater pleasure. Two to one they will vote for winter. Or look back over your own childhood, and see whether the sports of winter-time do not seem, in the retrospect, to have been the very crown of the year. How vivid my own recollections are! Other seasons had their own distinctive felicities; the year was full of delights; but we watched for the first snow-fall and the first ice as eagerly as I now see elderly and sickly people watching for the first symptoms of summer. As well as I can remember, winter was never too long nor too cold, whatever may have been true of a single day now and then, when the old school-house, with its one small stove, and its eight or ten large windows, ought, in all reason, to have been condemned as uninhabitable. But the frolics out-of-doors! It makes the blood tingle even now to think
of them. How brief the days were! How cruel the authority that kept us in the house after dark, while so many of our mates were still "sliding down hill" (we knew nothing of "coasting" where I was born), or skating in the meadow! Childhood in the sunny South must be a very tame affair, New England youngsters being judges.
Trifles of this kind, if any be moved to call them such, are not to be sneered out of court. Fifteen years form no small part of a human life, and whatever helps us to grow up happy contributes in no slight degree to keep us happy to the end. "When I became a man I put away childish things"? Yes, it may be; but the very things that I boast of outgrowing have made me what I am. In truth, when it comes to such a question as this, I confess to putting more faith in the verdict of healthy children than in the unanimous theories and groans of whole congresses of valetudinarians. I am not yet so old nor so feeble but I gaze with something of my youthful enthusiasm upon the first snow. It quickens my pulse to see the ponds
frozen over, although my skates long since went out of commission; and I still find comfort in a tramp of five or six miles, with the path none too good, and the mercury half-way between the freezing point and zero. I like the buffeting of the north wind, and am not indisposed once in a while to wrestle with the frost for the possession of my own ears. Well as I love to loiter, I rejoice also in weather which makes loitering impossible; which puts new springs into a man's legs, and sets him spinning over the course whether he will or no. It will be otherwise with me by and by, I suppose, seeing how my venerable fellow-citizens are affected, but for the present nothing renews my physical youth more surely than a low temperature; a fact which I welcome as evidence that I am not yet going down-hill, however closely I may be nearing the summit.
Winter does us the honor to assume that we are not weaklings. Summer may coddle and flatter, but cold weather is no sentimentalist. Its kindest and tenderest mood has something of a stoical severity about it. It lays its finger without mercy on our most
vulnerable and sensitive spots. But withal, as I have said, if we really possess any reserved strength, it knows how to bring it out and make the most of it. What a fullness of vitality do we suddenly develop as we come into close quarters with this well-intentioned but rough and ready antagonist! In fine, winter is one of those rare and invaluable friends of whom Emerson speaks, who enable us to do what we can. To its good offices it is largely attributable, no doubt, that in the long run the inhabitants of temperate regions have always been too powerful for their rivals within the tropics. Frigidity is like poverty, a blessing to those who can bear it.
Winter in New England is not a time for gathering flowers out-of-doors, though, taking the years together, there is no month of the twelve wherein one may not pick a few blossoms even in Massachusetts; but if it effaces one set of pictures, it paints for us another; and a wise and liberal taste will reckon itself a debtor to both. To say nothing of the half-dozen mornings on which every tree and bush is arrayed in all the splendor of diamonds, or the other
half-dozen when they bow themselves under masses of new-fallen snow,—making no account of such exceptional pageants, which, indeed, are often so destructive as to lose much of their glory in the eyes of provident spectators,—I, for my own part, find a beauty in the very commonest of winter landscapes. Let the ground be altogether white, or altogether brown, or let it be covered so thinly that the grass-blades show dark above the snow; in any case, white or brown, or white and brown, to me it is all beautiful; beautiful in itself, and also by contrast with the greenness before and after; while, as for the trees, I like them so well in their state of undress that I question sometimes whether their leafy garments do not conceal more loveliness than they confer. We are grateful, of course, to pines and spruces; but what if all trees were evergreen? A questionable improvement, surely. No; suggestive and solemn as the falling of the leaves must ever be to us who read our own destiny in the annual parable, it would be sadder still if there were no such alternation, no diversity, but only one monotonous year on year of changeless verdure.
Winter beauty, such as I have been hinting at, is not far to seek, whether by townsman or rustic. Bostonians have only to cross the Mill-Dam,—a rather too fashionable promenade, it is true, but even here one may be tolerably certain of elbow-room on a January morning. Often have I taken this road to health and happiness, waxing enthusiastic as I have proceeded, admiring the snow-bound scene with a fervor which the most opulent of summer landscapes seldom excites; and, pushing on with increasing exhilaration, have brought up at last on Corey Hill, where the inquisitive north-wind has very likely abbreviated my stay, but has never yet spoiled my rapture at the wonderful white world underneath.
Economy has its pleasures, it is said, for all healthily constituted minds. We like, all of us, to make much out of little; to do a notable piece of work with ordinary tools; to treat a meagre and commonplace theme in such a manner that whoever begins to read has no alternative but to finish; to tempt an epicure with the daintiest of repasts out of the simplest and fewest of every-day materials; to paint a picture