NEW ENGLAND WINTER. 



While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that 

 nothing can make life a burden to me. THOREAU. 



THOSE who will have us all to be study- 

 ing the Sacred Books of the East, and other 

 such literature, are given to laying it down 

 as an axiom that whoever knows only one 

 religion knows none at all, an assertion, I 

 am bound to acknowledge, that commends 

 itself to my reason, notwithstanding the 

 somewhat serious inferences fairly deduci- 

 ble from it touching the nature and worth 

 of certain convictions of my own, which I 

 have been wont to look upon as religious. I 

 cannot profess ever to have pried into the 

 mysteries of any faith except Christianity. 

 So, of course, I do not understand even that. 

 And the people about me, so far as I can 

 discover, are all in the same predicament. 

 Yet I would fain believe that we are not 

 exactly heathen. Some of my neighbors 

 (none too many of them, I confess) are 



