A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 27 



whenever a loose casement or a waving curtain chose to 

 give you the goose-flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his 

 letters, gives us a notion how uncomfortable it was in the 

 country, with green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and 

 windows that thought it was their duty to make the wind 

 whistle, not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not 

 have been much better in the city, to judge by Menage s 

 warning against the danger of our dressing-gowns taking 

 fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze. 

 The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in bed, 

 with his hand through a hole in the blanket ; and we may 

 suspect that it was the warmth quite as much as the 

 company that first drew men together at the coffee-house. 

 Coleridge, in January 1800, writes to Wedgewood : &quot;I am 

 sitting by a fire in a rug greatcoat. ... It is most barbar 

 ously cold, and you, I fear, can shield yourself from it only 

 by perpetual imprisonment.&quot; This thermometrical view of 

 winter is, I grant, a depressing one ; for I think there is 

 nothing so demoralising as cold. I know of a boy who, 

 when his father, a bitter economist, was brought home 

 dead, said only, &quot;Now we can burn as much wood as we 

 like.&quot; I would not off-hand prophesy the gallows for that 

 boy. I remember with a shudder a pinch I got from the 

 cold once in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh air, 

 I found myself glad to see the windows hermetically sealed 

 by the freezing vapour of our breath, and plotted the 

 assassination of the conductor every time he opened the 

 door. I felt myself sensibly barbarising, and would have 

 shared Colonel Jack s bed in the ash-hole of the glass- 

 furnace with a grateful heart. Since then I have had more 

 charity for the prevailing ill-opinion of winter. It was 

 natural enough that Ovid should measure the years of his 

 exile in Pontus by the number of winters. 



&quot; Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister. 

 Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris &quot; 



&quot; Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I 

 In Pontus was, thrice Euxine s wave ma&amp;lt;!c hard,&quot; 



