ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 4! 



light, as she rises on the infinite silence of winter night? 

 High in the heavens also she seems to bring out some in- 

 tenser property of cold with her chilly polish. The poets have 

 instinctively noted this. When Goody Blake imprecates a 

 curse of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, she has 



The cold, cold moon above her head ; 



and Coleridge speaks of 



The silent icicles, 

 Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon. 



As you walk homeward, for it is time that we should end 

 our ramble, you may perchance hear the most impressive 

 sound in nature, unless it be the fall of a tree in the forest 

 during the hush of summer noon. It is the stifled shriek of the 

 lake yonder as the frost throttles it. Wordsworth has de 

 scribed it (too much, I fear, in the style of Dr. Armstrong) : 



And, interrupting oft that eager game, 

 From under Esthwaite s splitting fields of ice, 

 The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, 

 Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills a loud 

 Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves 

 Howling in troops along the Bothnic main. 



Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a different dialect 

 from ours) calls it admirably well a whoop. But it is a 

 noise like none other, as if Demogorgon were moaning 

 inarticulately from under the earth. Let us get within doors, 

 lest we hear it again, for there is something bodeful and 

 uncanny in it. 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN 

 FOREIGNERS. 



WALKING one day toward the Village, as we used to 

 call it in the good old days when almost every 

 dweller in the town had been born in it, I was enjoying that 

 delicious sense of disenthralment from the actual which the 

 deepening twilight brings with it, giving, as it does, a sort of 

 obscure novelty to things familiar. The coolness, the hush, 

 broken only by the distant bleat of some belated goat, 

 querulous to be disburdened of her milky load, the few faint 

 stars, more guessed as yet than seen ; the sense that the 



