For the fact is that the fireside, whether in Captain’s Gully in summer-time or at home in dead of winter, is a sort of magic observatory, a kind of camera-obscura. Outside, the world is wrapped in impenetrable darkness. But the kindly glow of the fire stimulates the memory, spurs the imagination, and brings back all our lost loves and all our veiled landscapes in a beautified and idealized form. The lonely man sees faces in the fire; but there are other things as well. The springs and summers that haunt our fancy as we talk of them beside a roaring fire are the blithest and gayest seasons that the world has ever known. Never was sky so blue, [180] or earth so fair, or sun so bright, or air so sweet as the sky and the earth, the sun and the air, that we contemplate from our coign of vantage
by the side of the fire. The fragrance of the hawthorn in the hedgerow; the humming of the bees along the bank; the carolling of birds in the tree-tops; the bleating of the lambs across the meadows,—these never appear so alluring as when we view them from the wonderful observatory at the fireside. Dean Hole tells with what sadness he used to pluck the last roses of summer. And then, he says, ‘the chill evenings come, curtains are drawn, and bright fires glow. Then who is so happy as the rose-grower with the new catalogues before him?’ He sits by his fire and talks lovingly of the roses that he grew in the summer that has vanished, and his eyes light up with enthusiasm as he thinks of the still fairer blossoms of the summer that will soon be here. And so two summer-times sit by his hearth at mid-winter, and he revels in the company of each of them.
It is ever so. The crackling of the logs wakes up the slumbering Past, and it all comes back to us. As soon as a man gets his feet on the fender he instinctively thinks of old times and old companions. The flames have destroyed much; but they also revive much. They bring back to us our yesterdays; they bring back, indeed, the lordly yesterdays of [181] the remotest, stateliest antiquity. Surely that was the idea in Macaulay’s mind when he wrote ‘Horatius’:
And in the nights of winter,
When the cold north winds blow,
And the long howling of the wolves
Is heard amidst the snow;
When round the lonely cottage
Roars loud the tempest’s din,
And the good logs of Algidus