Herrick.
"Sic vita."
I believe no one attempts to praise the climate of New-England. The very low average of health there, the prevalence of consumption and of decay of the teeth, are evidences of an unwholesome climate which I believe are universally received as such. The mortality among children throughout the whole country is a dark feature of life in the United States. I do not know whether any investigation has been made into the numbers who die in infancy; but there can be no mistake in assuming that it is much greater than among the classes in Europe who are in a situation of equal external comfort. It was afflicting to meet with cases of bereavement which seem to leave few hopes or objects in life; it is afflicting to review them now, as they rise up before my mind. One acquaintance of mine had lost four out of six children; another five out of seven; another six out of seven; another thirteen out of sixteen; and one mourner tells me that a fatality seems to attend the females of his family, for, out of eighteen, only one little granddaughter survives; and most of this family died very young, and of different kinds of disease. Never did I see so many wo-worn mothers as in America. Wherever we went in the North, we heard of "the lung fever" as of a common complaint, and children seemed to be as liable to it as grown persons. The climate is doubtless chiefly to blame for all this, and I do not see how any degree of care could obviate much of the evil. The children must be kept warm within doors; and the only way of affording them the range of the house is by warming the whole, from the cellar to the garret, by means of a furnace in the hall. This makes all comfortable within; but, then, the risk of going out is very great. There is far less fog and damp than in England, and the perfectly calm, sunny days of midwinter are endurable; but the least breath of wind seems to chill one's very life. I had no idea what the suffering from extreme cold amounted to till one day, in Boston, I walked the length of the city and back again in a wind, with the thermometer seven degrees and a half below zero. I had been warned of the cold, but was anxious to keep an appointment to attend a meeting. We put on all the merinoes and furs we could muster; but we were insensible of them from the moment the wind reached us. My muff seemed to be made of ice; I almost fancied I should have been warmer without it. We managed getting to the meeting pretty well, the stock of warmth we had brought out with us lasting till then. But we set out cold on our return; and, by the time I got home, I did not very well know where I was and what I was about. The stupefaction from cold is particularly disagreeable, the sense of pain remaining through it; and I determined not to expose myself to it again. All this must be dangerous to children; and if, to avoid it, they are shut up during the winter, there remains the danger of encountering the ungenial spring.
It is a wretched climate. The old lines would run in my head,
"And feel, by turns, the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce:
From beds of raging fire to starve in ice
Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine
Immoveable, infixed, and frozen round,
Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire."
The fiery part of the trial, however, I did not much mind; for, after the first week of languor, I enjoyed the heat, except for the perpetual evidence that was before us of the mischief or fatality of its effects to persons who could not sit in the shade, and take it quietly, as we could. There were frequent instances of death in the streets, and the working-people suffer cruelly in the hot months. But the cold is a real evil to all classes, and, I think, much the most serious of the two. I found the second winter more trying than the first, and I hardly know how I should have sustained a third.
Every season, however, has its peculiar pleasures; and in the retrospect these shine out brightly, while the evils disappear.
On a December morning you are awakened by the domestic scraping at your hearth. Your anthracite fire has been in all night; and now the ashes are carried away, more coal is put on, and the blower hides the kindly red from you for a time. In half an hour the fire is intense, though, at the other end of the room, everything you touch seems to blister your fingers with cold. If you happen to turn up a corner of the carpet with your foot, it gives out a flash; and your hair crackles as you brush it. Breakfast is always hot, be the weather what it may. The coffee is scalding, and the buckwheat cakes steam when the cover is taken off. Your host's little boy asks whether he may go coasting to-day, and his sisters tell you what day the schools will all go sleighing. You may see boys coasting on Boston Common all the winter day through; and too many in the streets, where it is not so safe. To coast is to ride on a board down a frozen slope; and many children do this in the steep streets which lead down to the Common, as well as on the snowy slopes within the enclosure where no carriages go. Some sit on their heels on the board, some on their crossed legs. Some strike their legs out, put their arms a-kimbo, and so assume an air of defiance amid their velocity. Others prefer lying on their stomachs, and so going headforemost; an attitude whose comfort I never could enter into. Coasting is a wholesome exercise for hardy boys. Of course they have to walk up the ascent, carrying their boards between every feat of coasting; and this affords them more exercise than they are at all aware of taking.
As for the sleighing, I heard much more than I experienced of its charms. No doubt early association has something to do with the American fondness for this mode of locomotion; and much of the affection which is borne to music, dancing, supping, and all kinds of frolic, is transferred to the vehicle in which the frolicking parties are transported. It must be so, I think, or no one would be found to prefer a carriage on runners to a carriage on wheels, except on an untrodden expanse of snow. On a perfectly level and crisp surface I can fancy the smooth rapid motion to be exceedingly pleasant; but such surfaces are rare in the neighbourhood of populous cities. The uncertain, rough motion in streets hillocky with snow, or on roads consisting for the season of a ridge of snow with holes in it, is disagreeable, and provocative of headache. I am no rule for others as to liking the bells; but to me their incessant jangle was a great annoyance. Add to this the sitting, without exercise, in a wind caused by the rapidity of the motion, and the list of désagrémens is complete. I do not know the author of a description of sleighing which was quoted to me, but I admire it for its fidelity. "Do you want to know what sleighing is like? You can soon try. Set your chair on a springboard out in the porch on Christmas day; put your feet in a pailful of powdered ice; have somebody to jingle a bell in one ear, and somebody else to blow into the other with the bellows, and you will have an exact idea of sleighing."
I was surprised to find that young people whose health is too delicate to allow them to do many simple things, are not too delicate to go out sleighing in an open sleigh. They put hot bricks under their feet, and wrap up in furs; but the face remains exposed, and the breathing the frosty air of a winter's night, after dancing, may be easily conceived to be the cause of much of the "lung fever" of which the stranger hears. The gayest sleighing that I saw was on the day when all the schools in Boston have a holyday, and the pupils go abroad in a long procession of sleighs. The multitude of happy young faces, though pinched with cold, was a pretty sight.