Master and lord I am, says he,
And of good right so ought to be,
Since I make causeys, safely crost,
Of mud, with just a pinch of frost.
But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out-door company.
Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it, if ever any, confesses,
“The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
Sings in my ear, my hands are stones,
Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense,
And hems in life with narrowing fence.”
Winter was literally “the inverted year,” as Thomson called him; for such entertainments as could be had must be got within doors. What cheerfulness there was in brumal verse was that of Horace’s dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens, so pleasantly associated with the cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the tone of that poem of Walton’s friend Cotton, which won the praise of Wordsworth:—
“Let us home,
Our mortal enemy is come;
Winter and all his blustering train
Have made a voyage o’er the main.
. . . . .
“Fly, fly, the foe advances fast;
Into our fortress let us haste.
Where all the roarers of the north
Can neither storm nor starve us forth.
“There underground a magazine
Of sovereign juice is cellared in,
Liquor that will the siege maintain
Should Phœbus ne’er return again.
. . . . .
“Whilst we together jovial sit
Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit,
Where, though bleak winds confine us home
Our fancies round the world shall roam.”
Thomson’s view of Winter is also, on the whole, a hostile one, though he does justice to his grandeur.
“Thus Winter falls,
A heavy gloom oppressive o’er the world,
Through Nature shedding influence malign.”
He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house, though more refined:—