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GAIETIES

AND

GRAVITIES.

WINTER.

THE mill-wheel 's frozen in the stream,
The church is deck'd with holly,
Misletoe hangs from the kitchen-beam,
To fright away melancholy :
Icicles clink in the milkmaid's pail,
Younkers skate on the pool below,
Blackbirds perch on the garden rail,

And hark, how the cold winds blow!

There goes the squire to shoot at snipe,

Here runs Dick to fetch a log;

You'd swear his breath was the smoke of a pipe,

In the frosty morning fog.

Hodge is breaking the ice for the kine,

Old and young cough as they go,

The round red sun forgets to shine,

And hark, how the cold winds blow!

In short, winter is come at last-a mighty evil to the shivering hypochondriacs, who are glad to catch at any excuse to be miserable; but a visitation which, by

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those who are in no actual danger of dining with Duke Humphrey, or of being driven, from lack of raiment, to join in the exclamation of poor Tom, may very appropriately be hailed in the language of Satan, " Evil, be thou my good!" The Spaniards have a proverb, that God sends the cold according to the clothes; and though the callousness and hardihood acquired by the ragged be the effect of exposure, and not an exemption from the general susceptibility, the adage is not the less true, and illustrates that beneficent provision of Nature, which, operating in various ways, compensates the poor for their apparent privations, converts the abused luxuries of the rich into severe correctives, and thus pretty nearly equalizes, through the various classes of mortals, the individual portions of suffering and enjoyment. In the distribution of the seasons, care seems to have been taken that mankind should have the full benefit of this system of equivalents. To an admirer of Nature, it is certainly melancholy to be no longer able to see the lusty green boughs wrestling with the wind, or dancing in the air to the sound of their own music; to lose the song of the lark, the nightingale, the blackbird, and the thrush; the sight of the waving corn, the green and flowery fields, the rich landscape, the blue and sunny skies. It appears a woeful contrast, when the glorious sun and the azure face of heaven are perpetually hidden from us by a thick veil of fog; when the poached and swampy fields are silent and desolate, and seem, with a scowl, to warn us off their premises; when the leafless trees stand like gaunt skeletons,

while their offspring leaves are lying at their feet, buried in a winding-sheet of snow. There is a painful sense of imposition, too, in feeling that you are paying taxes for windows which afford you no light; that for the bright and balmy breathings of Heaven, you are presented with a thick yellow atmosphere, which irritates your eyes, without assisting them to see. Well, I admit that we must betake ourselves, in-doors, to our shaded lamps and our snug firesides. There is no great hardship in that: but our minds are driven in-doors also, they are compelled to look inwards, to draw from their internal resources; and I do contend that this is the unlocking of a more glorious mental world, abundantly atoning for all our external annoyances, were they even ten times more offensive. That man must have a poor and frozen fancy who does not possess a sun and moon obedient to his own will, which he can order to arise with much less difficulty than he can ring up his servants on these dark mornings; and as to woods, lakes, and mountains, he who cannot conjure them up to his mind's eye with all their garniture and glory, as glibly as he can pronounce the words, may depend upon it that he is-no conjurer. It is well known, that in our dreams objects are presented to us with more vivid brilliancy and effect than they ever assume to our ordinary perceptions, and the imaginary landscapes that glitter before us in our waking dreams are unquestionably more enchanting than even the most picturesque reality. They are poetical exaggerations of beauty, the beau idéal of Nature. Then is it that a vivacious

and creative faculty springs up within us, whose omnipotent and magic wand, like the sword of harlequin, can convert a Lapland hut into the Athenian Parthenon, and transform the desolate snow-clad hills of Siberia, with their boors and bears, into the warm and sunny vale of the Thessalian Tempè, where, through the glimpses of the pines, we see a procession of shepherds and shepherdesses marching to offer sacrifice in the temple of Pan, while the air brings to us, at intervals, the faint sound of the hymn they are chanting. There was nothing ridiculous in the saying of the clown, who complained that he could not see London for the houses. Mine is a similar predicament in the month of June; I cannot see such landscapes as I have been describing, on account of the trees and fields that surround me. The real shuts out the ideal. The Vale of Health upon Hampstead Heath deprives me, for months together, of the Vale of Tempè; and the sand-boys and girls, with their donkies, drive away Pegasus upon a full gallop, and eject the nymphs and fauns from the sanctuary of my mind. The corporeal eye puts out the mental one: I am obliged to take pastoral objects as they present themselves, and to believe the hand-writing on the fingerposts which invariably and solemnly assert that I am within four miles of London, and not in "Arcady's delicious dales," on the "vine-covered hills and gay valleys of France," or in Italy's "love-breathing woods, and lute-resounding waves." But when the fields around me are covered with snow, and fogs and darkness are upon the land, I exclaim with Milton,

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so much the rather thou, shine inward, light divine;" and, betaking myself to my fire-side, lo!, the curtain is drawn up, and all the magnificent scenery of classic realms and favoured skies bursts upon my vision, with an overpowering splendour. Talk not to me of the inspiration and rapture diffused around Parnassus and Helicon; of the poetic intoxication derived from quaffing the "dews of Castaly," the true, the blushful Hippocrene,”-or "Aganippe's rill." I boldly aver, that Apollo himself walking amid the groves of the muse-haunted mountain, never shook such radiant inspiration from his locks as often gushes from the bars of a registerstove, when the Pierian " Wall's End" or "Russel's Main” has had its effulgence stimulated by a judiciously applied poker; and as to potable excitements of genius, I will set the single port of Canton against the whole of European and Asiatic Greece, and am prepared to prove, that more genuine Parnassian stimulus has emanated from a single chest of eight-shilling black tea, than from all the rills and founts of Arcady, Thessaly, and Boeotia. I am even seriously inclined to doubt whether the singing of the nightingale has ever awakened so much enthusiasm, or dictated so many sonnets, as the singing of the tea-kettle.

For my

December is the true pastoral month. part, I consider my Christmas summer as having just set in. It was but last night that I enjoyed my first Italian sunrise. I was sitting, or rather standing, with my shoulders supported against a chesnuttree, about half way down the slope of the celebrated

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