Now look down from your hillside across the valley. The trees are leafless, but this is the season to study their anatomy, and did you ever notice before how much color there is in the twigs of many of them? And the smoke from those chimneys is so blue it seems like a feeder of the sky into which it flows. Winter refines it and gives it agreeable associations. In summer it suggests cookery or the drudgery of steam-engines, but now your fancy (if it can forget for a moment the dreary usurpation of stoves) traces it down to the fireside and the brightened faces of children. Thoreau is the only poet who has fitly sung it. The wood-cutter rises before day and
“First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad
His early scout, his emissary, smoke,
The earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof,
To feel the frosty air; ...
And, while he crouches, still beside the hearth,
Nor musters courage to unbar the door,
It has gone down the glen with the light wind
And o’er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath.
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,
And warmed the pinions of the early bird;
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,
Has caught sight of the day o’er the earth’s edge,
And greets its master’s eye at his low door
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky.”
Here is very bad verse and very good imagination. He had been reading Wordsworth, or he would not have made tree-tops an iambus. In the Moretum of Virgil (or, if not his, better than most of his) is a pretty picture of a peasant kindling his winter-morning fire. He rises before dawn,
Sollicitaque manu tenebras explorat inertes
Vestigatque focum læsus quem denique sensit.
Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite fumus,
Et cinis obductæ celabat lumina prunæ.
Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucernam,
Et producit acu stupas humore carentes,
Excitat et crebris languentem flatibus ignem;
Tandem concepto tenebræ fulgore recedunt,
Oppositaque manu lumen defendit ab aura.
With cautious hand he gropes the sluggish dark,
Tracking the hearth which, scorched, he feels erelong.
In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained,
And raked-up ashes hid the cinders’ eyes;
Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he nears.
And, with a needle loosening the dry wick,
With frequent breath excites the languid flame.
Before the gathering glow the shades recede,
And his bent hand the new-caught light defends.
Ovid heightens the picture by a single touch:—
Ipse genu poito flammas exsuscitat aura.
Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames.
If you walk down now into the woods, you may find a robin or a blue-bird among the red-cedars, or a nuthatch scaling deviously the trunk of some hardwood tree with an eye as keen as that of a French soldier foraging for the pot-au-feu of his mess. Perhaps a blue-jay shrills cah cah in his corvine trebles, or a chickadee
“Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
Head downward, clinging to the spray.”