I hope I am not lacking in a wholesome disrespect for sentimentality and affectation; for artificial ecstasies over sunsets and landscapes, birds and flowers; the fashionable cant of nature-worship, which is enough almost to seal a true worshiper's lips under a vow of everlasting silence. But such repugnances belong to the library and the parlor, and are left behind when a man goes abroad, either by himself or in any other really good company. For my own part
the first lisp of a chickadee out of a wayside thicket disperses with a breath all such unhappy and unhallowed recollections. Here is a voice sincere, and the response is instantaneous and irresistible.
It would be a breach of good manners, an inexcusable ingratitude, to write never so briefly of the New England winter without noting this, the most engaging and characteristic enlivener of our winter woods; who revels in snow and ice, and is never lacking in abundant measures of faith and cheerfulness, enough not only for himself, but for any chance wayfarer of our own kind. He is every whit as independent as the shrike, but in how opposite a manner!—with a self-reliance that is never self-sufficiency, and bravery that offers no suspicion of bravado. Happy in himself, he is at the same time of a most companionable spirit. Perfect little philosopher! What a paradise New England would be if all her inhabitants were like him!
In such a winter climate as ours it is emphatically true that we "know not what shall be on the morrow." The season is not straitened in its resources, and caters
to all tastes in a way which some may look upon as fickleness, but which I prefer to regard as catholicity. Its days are of many types, and it spreads them out before us like a patient shopkeeper,—as if it recognized in the Yankee a customer hard to suit. I do not mean to affirm that the weather and I are never at odds; but all in all, in the long run and theoretically, I approve its methods. What a humdrum round life would be if nothing ever happened but the expected! I wonder if there are beings anywhere who have forgotten how it feels to be surprised. The children of this world, at all events, were not intended for any such condition of fixity. When there is no longer anything new under the sun, it will be time to get above it.
Even in so simple and regular a proceeding as a morning walk, one wishes always to see something new, or failing of that, something old in a new light; an easy enough task, if one has eyes. For as we cannot drink twice of the same river, so we cannot twice take the same ramble. I went over the same course yesterday and to-day; but yesterday's landscape and sky were
different from to-day's. I saw different birds, and had different thoughts; and after all, the principal part of a walk is what goes on in the mind. Still, the activities of the intellect are greatly under the influence of external surroundings, a fact which makes largely in favor of a varied year like that we have been praising. The experience of it tends to widen and diversify the thinking of men. In a smaller degree it answers the same end as travel. For aught I know, it may possibly have its little share in the onerous task of liberalizing systems of theology. Who shall say that our New England climate, with its frequent and extreme contrasts,—what I have called its habit of catholicity,—may not have had more or less to do with that diffusion of free thought which has made the home of the Pilgrims the birthplace of heresies without number? The suggestion is fanciful, perhaps. Let it pass. Such profundities do not come within my province. Only I must believe that, even in the matter of weather, it is good for us to be educated out of bigotry into a large-minded toleration. Hence it is, in part, that I give my suffrage for our
Massachusetts winter, which not only widens the scope of the year, but contains within itself a variety wellnigh endless.
I have kept my subject out-of-doors. It is well always to have at least one point of originality. Let it be mine, in the present instance, that I have said nothing about the pleasures of the fireside, about long evenings and drawn curtains. If I were in winter's place, I should not greatly care to hear people tell how comfortable they could make themselves by jealously shutting me out. Their speech might be eloquent, and their language eulogistic; but somehow I should not feel that they were praising me.