30 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



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

 follows Thomson. With him, too, &quot;Winter desolates the 

 year,&quot; and 



&quot;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 

 &quot;Where chiefs or legislators lie,&quot; etc. 



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 etc., well knowing that what follows 

 is but the coming-round again of what went before, march 

 ing 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 

 experienced the contrast, how sensibly our winter is 

 alleviated by the longer daylight and the pellucid atmos 

 phere. 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 opposite 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 &quot; that his vein never happily flowed but from 

 the autumnal equinox to the vernal,&quot; though in his 

 twentieth year he had written, on the return of spring, 



&quot; Fallor ? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires 

 Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest ? &quot; 



&quot; Err I ? or do the powers of song return 

 To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ? &quot; 



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



