A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 43 



doors than any other, and I think our winter may fairly 

 make the same boast as compared with the rest of the year. 

 Its still mornings, with the thermometer near zero, put a 

 premium on walking. There is more sentiment in turf, 

 perhaps, and it is more elastic to the foot ; its silence, too, 

 is well-nigh as congenial with meditation as that of fallen 

 pine tassel ; but for exhilaration there is nothing like a stiff 

 snow-crust that creaks like a cricket at every step, and com 

 municates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you 

 drink is frappe, all its grosser particles precipitated, and 

 the dregs of your blood with them. A purer current 

 mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, and 

 rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. There is nothing 

 left to breed an exhalation of ill-humour or despondency, 

 They say that this rarefied atmosphere has lessened the 

 capacity of our lungs. Be it so. Quart-pots are for mud 

 dier liquor than nectar. To me, the city in winter is 

 infinitely dreary the sharp street-corners have such a chill 

 in them, and the snow so soon loses its maidenhood to 

 become a mere drab &quot;doing shameful things,&quot; as Steele 

 says of politicians, &quot; without being ashamed.&quot; I pine for 

 the Quaker purity of my country landscape. I am speak 

 ing, of course, of those winters that are not niggardly of 

 snow, as ours too often are, giving us a gravelly dust 

 instead. Nothing can be unsightlier that those piebald 

 fields where the coarse brown hide of Earth shows through 

 the holes of her ragged ermine. But even when there is 

 abundance of snow, I find as I grow older that there are 

 not so many good crusts as there used to be. When I first 

 observed this, I rashly set it to the account of that general 

 degeneracy in nature (keeping pace with the same melan 

 choly phenomenon in man) which forces itself upon the 

 attention and into the philosophy of middle life. But hap 

 pening once to be weighed, it occurred to me that an arch 

 which would bear fifty pounds could hardly be blamed for 

 giving way under more than three times the weight. I 

 have sometimes thought that if theologians would remember 

 this in their arguments, and consider that the man may 



