26 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



While without 



The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat 

 Between the groaning forest and the shore 

 Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, 

 A rural, sheltered, solitary scene, 

 Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join 

 To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit 

 And hold high converse with the mighty dead. 



Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect, 

 follows Thomson. With him, too, Winter desolates the 

 year/ and 



How pleasing wears the wintry night 

 Spent with the old illustrious dead ! 

 While by the taper s trembling light 

 I seem those awful scenes to tread 

 Where chiefs or legislators lie, &c. 



Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. He had 

 the conceptions of a great poet with less faculty than many 

 a little one, and is one of those versifiers of whom it is 

 enough to say that we are always willing to break him off in 

 the middle with an c., well knowing that what follows is 

 but the coming-round again of what went before, marching 

 in a circle with the cheap numerosity of a stage-army. In 

 truth, it is no wonder that the short days of that cloudy 

 northern climate should have added to winter a gloom 

 borrowed of the mind. We hardly know, till we have ex 

 perienced the contrast, how sensibly our winter is alleviated 

 by the longer daylight and the pellucid atmosphere. I once 

 spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared 

 with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun 

 when I saw him groping among the chimney-pots oppo 

 site my windows as he described his impoverished arc 

 in the sky. The enforced seclusion of the season makes it 

 the time for serious study and occupations that demand 

 fixed incomes of unbroken time. This is why Milton said 

 * that his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal 

 equinox to the vernal, though in his twentieth year he had 

 written, on the return of spring, 



Fallor ? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires 

 Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest ? 



Err I ? or do the powers of song return 

 To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ? 



Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to notice the 

 cheerfulness of snow in sunshine. His Harz-reise im 

 Winter gives no hint of it, for that is a diluted reminiscence 



