58 February Winter Reading. 



through the months of gloom, in crowded Lapland 

 huts. The perfect winter, more horrible than any 

 dream of poetry except Dante's frozen hell, is the 

 winter of Spitzbergen, where indeed some timber may 

 be found, but only driftwood, washed by the surf of 

 the Atlantic on that treeless northern shore, or frag- 

 ments of hapless vessels crushed long ago like nut- 

 shells in the ice. 



I suppose that every European who has written a y 

 thing about winter has certainly alluded to the one 

 indisputable benefit which that season brings to us, in 

 inclining us to be more studious of books. We never 

 read so profitably, I think, as we do by the fireside on 

 a winter's evening ; and if in a future state of existence 

 there should be any hours that we have passed in this 

 world to which we may look back with feelings of 

 tenderness and regret, it would be those fire-side hours 

 in which our minds have sought a light that is not the 

 sun's light, and which comes to us through literature. 



Amongst other readings that seemed more partic- 

 ularly adapted to the season, I had selected passages 

 of English poets who had described winter with great 

 earnestness of manner, though not always with equal 

 felicity of style. It is not easy, in the blank verse of 

 Cowper, to find a passage that may be quoted without 

 the wish, to pass over some line that is either halting 

 or prosaic, or else that slips away too suddenly from 

 under you ; but there is one the description of that 

 famous freak of the Empress Catherine, the ice-palace 

 on the shore of the Neva which is firm and sound 



