I
cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal
bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire.
Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero
if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are
frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in
the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of
fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes
glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the
folds of her *yashmak;*(3) schoolboys coasting down street
like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams
flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow, or blazing
upon ice jewelry of tree and roof: there is nothing in all this to
complain of. A storm of summer has its redeeming
sublimities,--its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming
in the western horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined
with fire, shattered by exploding thunders. Even the wild
gales of the equinox have their varieties,--sounds of wind-
shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of sign and
casement, hurricane puffs, and down-rushing rain-spouts. But
this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very
clouds seem too spiritless and languid to storm outright or
take themselves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath
and above, reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of
Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz(4)
administers his hydropathic torment,--
"A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench,--
The land it soaks is putrid;"
or rather, as everything animate and inanimate is seething in
warm mist, suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and
rheumatic, is trying the efficacy of a Thomsonian steam-box(5)
on a grand scale; no sounds save the heavy plash of muddy
feet on the pavements; the monotonous, melancholy drip from
trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of waterducts,
swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-
colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down
about one, beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or
dark projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a
chimney-pot,--he who can extract pleasurable emotions from
the alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I
am wholly unacquainted.
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