Unattributed.
Originally published in Harper's Monthly Magazine (Harper and Brothers) vol.16 #93 (Feb 1858).
Thanks for Winter! Thanks to Winter! Yes, to Winter, for we like to think of winter as something more than a mere phenomenon of nature. It is almost an existence—a wild, untamed personality—sternly conscious of its power, and self-demonstrative beyond all the seasons. Winter stands in the category of nature by itself. The other seasons are variations of the same aspects—modifications of the same laws; but winter is a character by itself—a wondrous individuality in look, tone, manner. It is no conformist, but establishes its own rule and originates its own fashion, and therefore we love it: for, while the other seasons are neat, trim, civilized beauties, winter has just enough of the rude, aboriginal force to stir our manlier blood.
Every one who has any natural pluck in him feels this waking up of his more heroic qualities so soon as Winter blows his first blast. It is a trumpet-sound of battle. "The instinctive warrior springs up within us, and rejoices in the opportunity. Out in the open fields, amidst stormy scenes, we feel a quickening for conflict. There is something to be resisted. There is a victory to be won. Rough winds and savage tempests are to be confronted and conquered. For the rest of the year we are all tame in the presence of Nature. Our passive qualities are in play; we quietly sympathize with the loveliness around us; we are subdued into gentle behavior, and, in communion with the beautiful world, we enjoy a kind of parlor-life that tones us down to mild emotions and graceful steps. But the grand old winter sets us free. We bound into liberty—we cry "Huzza!" and rush into the affray of the elements; we are Byronic in more than poetic sentiment—and "a part of the tempest and of thee" glows in our blood like a new principle of vitality.
In this respect winter is a great benefactor. It takes us out of our easy habits and rouses will and energy. Foster ought to have honored it as one of the sources of decision of character, for it is a true friend to strength and majesty of nature. We can't afford to be relaxed now. Every thing within us must be tightly drawn. Nerve and muscle must be in complete tension, and the full measure of vigor must be in exercise. The animal feeling transfers itself into the spirit, and we are competent to mightier tasks than pleasant skies and a soft atmosphere allow. No doubt thought and sensibility are large debtors to spring and summer. Love and beauty then see their images every where. Nature is a gallery of fine art, and life is a day of festal gladness. But winter is the era of power. It deals in sublimity, grandeur, and its impressiveness goes with a solemn weightiness into the depths of the soul. How much more of massiveness there is in the ideas which it suggests! All its images are on a broader scale. It has few small beauties. It strings no pearls on silken threads. It offers no miniature pictures. Variety is shut out and monotony is glorified. We get widely-extended views, and are occupied by oneness. At other seasons one impression is fast supplanted by another, and we are taxed with rapid and versatile admiration. We take the motion of restless bees, flying birds, sailing clouds. One state of mind quickly succeeds another. But in winter we are detained spectators. The panorama is fixed, and we are students at leisure. Nature holds the sense in captivity to sameness, and its great spectacles are kept firmly and long before us.
Now this is an intellectual benefit. Insensibly to ourselves, it educates us to a more thorough survey, and secures a more accurate and finished perception. Hence the more truthful portraitures of winter that abound in our great poets. Our best paintings of winter-scenes always convey a more definite and satisfactory idea of their meaning than other pictures. If they have a narrower range, they are more intense; and on this account it is worth while to cultivate the habit of observation in winter. It is not the same exercise as observation in summer; we have more to do with forms and bare outlines. The trees, the hills, the mountain curves, the sweep of the landscape, are far more statuesque. Less like pictures, they are more like sculpture. We study shape, symmetry, proportion to better advantage, and nature lets us into the secret of those abstract elements which make the foundation of beauty and grandeur. In this connection winter does for the artist a similar work to the dissecting-hall for the surgeon. The anatomy of form is exhibited. The most ordinary man of taste may verify this in experience. Take a noble oak, standing against a sunset-sky, and study its magnificent outline. Trunk, boughs, branches, are instinct with an omnipresent law that shapes them in obedience to its type, and it rears itself before you as an architecture of wonder and delight. What a well-ordered system throughout its whole extent! What an expenditure of vigor, and yet what economy in its outlay of life! How every limb leaves the main shaft with wood enough to reach its boundary line, tapering as it stretches itself out and gracefully striving to harmonize itself with the ideal of its beauty! And then the minute distinctness with which every part is set forth, and the perfect combination of the whole into a majestic appearance! See that tree next summer wearing its robe of foliage, and the previous analysis gives you an interest and a joy in it you never felt before. You can now understand how its vail of verdure is so charmingly hung around it, and why it bears itself so like a monarch of the forest. You comprehend how it sways itself with such serene strength in the storm, and converts the roar of the tempest into the music of its praise. And the same law of observation applies to every thing. Summer presents the concrete forms of beauty and splendor. We have the aggregate of shape, color, relation, and all Nature puts on her royal garments of state. And it is then that the aspects of the universe address our whole being, and feed the sense and the intellect with most enjoyment. But winter is the season to acquire truth and depth of imagination. We learn from its landscape—all bleak and barren—the fundamental principles of form and unity. In its uncovered grandeur, in its massive proportions, we trace the basis of summer's pomp and garniture.
The study of Nature is essential to the healthy and mature development of mind. Honor books as we may, they have but a one-sided work to perform. Fragments themselves, they make us partialists in thought and wisdom; and by too much attention to them, we get bound up in their muslin and leather, and, at last, take our place on the shelf with them. Books give a social spirit to the intellect, and create a community of sentiment and feeling. They are the mighty conservators of the world's mental brotherhood, and as such fulfill a great office. But Nature is the original literature. She is the oldest, grandest, divinest poem. She teaches the philosophy that anticipated Plato. Her offices were before Cicero, and her history antedated Thucydides; and she holds in trust for us a virtue and a culture not elsewhere attainable. Only in a limited way can she communicate through second hands. For much of her intelligence and power we must go directly to her fountains. But if Nature educate us, we must adopt her methods. We must learn seriatim. She travels through her circle—contracts and expands—shines and frowns. We must follow her changes, vary our position to suit her, fall into this or that mood as she may require. This is one of the chief benefits of observing Nature. Every season, every phenomenon, summons us into a new state of sympathy and alters the attitude of the intellect. She has no long audience. Wearisomeness and prolixity are no vices of hers. If we reason or imagine or beautify too much, she is quick to interpose her authoritative veto. Now it is wise to conform to this rule; and hence, if she has an intellectual and moral quickening for us in winter altogether different from summer, let us seize the advantages and become the better for them.
Winter is nature's great tonic for the body. Nerves and muscles are stronger for frosty nights and cold days. People travel and spend money to recruit health in summer; but what means of recreation, what watering-places, what medicinal waters, can compare with the bracing breath of winter? We have no doubt that Providence designs every man to lay up a stock of health in winter, just as summer and autumn supply us with a stock of provisions for bodily nourishment. And we ought then to labor for animal vigor as we labor in the other seasons for animal food. But how few people are on good terms with winter! Out of doors is the motto for winter. Out of doors, as much as possible; out of doors, heedless of our love of comfort and luxury; out of doors, despite of weather, whenever and wherever a prudent regard to circumstances will allow. Observation has long since convinced us that it is ordinarily much safer to err on the extreme of exposure than on the other extreme of confinement. The artificial winter in our houses has destroyed hundreds where the external cold has killed tens. Art is a far bloodier butcher than Nature. The human body knows its friends and values them. Indeed, it will bear a good deal of hard treatment from them. But its artificial friends—such friends as house-builders and furnace-manufacturers often prove to he—it despises and rejects. The most of our houses, as well as our habits, seem to be formed on the principle that manhood and womanhood are a prolonged infancy. For four months in every-year we adopt the regimen of babyhood, lacking only a cradle and a sucking-bottle to complete the correspondence. Nature's fresh, invigorating air—food for the lungs, life for the blood—is conscientiously excluded from our apartments, and air, dry to deathliness, poisoned by overheated iron, full of the impure gases of coal, is substituted in its stead. The ingenuity of science is taxed to contrive a way for us to be luxurious and healthy, while any squatter in a Western forest can build a healthier home than all the architects of the country put together. But so it is; we must have science in every thing. Science, in this wise age, must preach and pray. Science must construct our houses and ventilate them. Science must prescribe our diet, and order our comings, goings, and restings. Would not a little old-fashioned nature help us out of our troubles? If we violate the laws of our being, art can not save us from the penalty. If we breathe bad air, we can not expect to have good blood or good digestion. The instinct of nature in winter is for out-door exercise. Every thing in us clamors for it. The sharp air is like wine, and the muscles pant for motion. But we disobey the kind calls of our physical constitution. What wonder, then, that we suffer? If we practiced the rules of health in winter, we should feel the benefit all through the year. The heat of summer and the malaria of autumn would be much less pernicious. As it is, we enervate ourselves in cold weather, and then, reversing all natural methods, vainly try to find a compensation in mountain air or sea-bathing in the warm season.
To enjoy winter, forsake your luxurious house, and freely take the weather in its wildest moods. If you are not already half dead with disease, have no fear of ill consequences, for tolerable health can live and flourish in any sort of atmosphere. Have a strong will and a resolute love of action; brave the fury of the northwester; defy the driving wind and the cutting sleet, and you will be all the manlier and better for the endurance. We really gain nothing from our climate but in winter. All the rest of the year sky and landscape are enjoyable things, gliding easily and noiselessly into you, and requiring no sort of effort to realize their advantages. Winter is an honest old worthy that speaks rather sternly, has a repulsive manner, and deals in a bluff, straightforward way with your delicate touchiness. Yet beneath this rugged exterior what a warm heart he has, and how reliable! But to stand on fair terms with him there must be no sentimental softness. He tolerates none of your effeminacy. If the abuses of modern civilization have taken the iron and the granite out of you, winter will sport roughly with you: but no matter; never mind its blustering, meet it all bravely, and win its homage. A few trials, and you will balance your powers against all its threats and violence; a few more, and the snow, hail, and tempest will learn your pluck and acknowledge its superiority; and then, perchance, they will poetize, and paint, and chant most musical anthems for you. How your cheeks will grow ruddy with their unrivaled bloom! and how your eyes will outshine the auroral lights of the northern firmament, and what a volume of tone, taken from the free winds, will swell your voice! This is the charm of winter—the charm of personal combat. We wrestle with the opposing elements, and if we have courage enough to be men, we are sure to have energy sufficient to be triumphant victors. Now all this may sound like a strain of the imagination. But it is a meaning reality. Nature in winter challenges the strong heart of men and women, unspoiled by your devices of refinement. Fine ladies and gentlemen are silently ignored. They are not invited to its athletic strife. Balmy airs, green fields, and luscious orchards are for them. If you have a soul of steel, you will have joy in the conflict. No knight was ever happier in tournament than you, and, returning to your fireside laden with the spoils of success, you feel yourself entitled to its delightful repose. The economy of nature provides for intenser animal pleasures in winter than at any other season. Food, drink, sleep, exercise, are more relished, and impart a higher degree of excitement. The animal spirits are more vigorous. But to have these in perfection we must wrestle with the elements in the outer world, and draw strength from them.
Our countrymen, and especially our countrywomen, need the physical virtues of winter, more than any thing else, transfused into them. We are fast becoming a summer race, taking our complexion from lilies, and our strength from flowers. Never was Scripture more literally verified, for we are "as grass." But all this is against nature. Summer is perfection to vegetables and fruits; men require cold air and biting frosts. Heaven and earth are then propitious to blood and nerves—all the consciousness of physical manhood comes out in its full pride; it is a luxury to breathe, to walk, to labor, when vigor grows with every swing of the arm and every movement of the foot. Life in the open air is what we most want—life in the open air of winter. We ought to consider a good northwester as one of our institutions, and value it accordingly. But we are too artificial to follow the leadings of nature. In winter we scorn the air that cools our fevered blood. We will have nothing to do with ice, and the snow must be daintily used—a barrier of furs suitable for polar bears between us and it. In summer we fall back on winter, in so far as our sickly habits allow. We must have ice-water, ice-lemonade, ice-cream; we must be as cool as possible, so as to antagonize the arrangements of Providence; and thus we keep up a war the year round with the beneficent provisions of the world. A great law is violated in his way; for if the visible universe is beneficent by being in harmony with itself, each part working with every other part, it is equally necessary that man should be likewise in harmony with it. Nature, then, has a work to do for us in winter. Let us not thwart its designs. If we resist its goodness at this season, we shall find no compensation in other portions of the revolving year. Its keen air and bracing weather are for the animal man, and if we lose their benefits our manhood is so much the more effeminate and feeble.
Winter is the enjoyable season of household life. Home then realizes its designed seclusion; it is shut in from the outside world, and we rejoice in thick walls and substantial roofs. The fireside now has a meaning—provided it is a fireside, and not a modern counterfeit fed by hot air from a furnace. No feature of home has such associations as the fireside, for it gathers most of our touching memories around it. The cradle, the old arm-chair, the evening reading-table, are connected with it; and there, in early childhood, stretched on the rug, we used to dream of the mysteries of coming life until the sweet perplexity calmed us into sleep. The fireside is the heart of home. It circulates the joy of life throughout the dwelling; and along the halls, from cellar to attic, you can hear the tones whose key-note begins there. We remember little of father and mother except what they were around the cheerful fire; the hearth-stone is the pedestal of their images, and the serene glow of the evening light on their faces is the favorite picture which the mind cherishes. How much blessedness winter brings to a comfortable home! Just let it be comfortable, not luxurious; for luxury spoils the beauty of the impression. To our taste the plain old-fashioned furniture, with its simple lounges and stuffed rocking-chairs, is in better keeping with the ideal of the fireside than our recent finery. We would far rather see the skill of mother and sisters in the covered sofa, in the hangings about the windows, than to be entertained with the devices of the upholsterer. The room containing the family fireside ought to be thoroughly domestic, showing the spirit of household life in its arrangements. Fashionable art has no business here. It is the pictorial gallery of the family, and all its articles, wearing an aspect of gentle repose, ought to represent the sentiment of domestic character.
Every family should feel that winter is the great season for its culture. Home is then paramount to every other consideration. There is not so much to divert our attention, nor are the claims of business and outward occupancy so engrossing. If you are wise you will now be intent on enlarging your stock of domestic happiness. Every one within the charmed circle will be drawn closer to your affections. You will talk to instruct and please them, read to improve them, and be studious of amusements to gratify them. A little wisdom is very valuable just here, for it checks the tyranny of selfishness over our nature and insensibly takes us out of ourselves for the service of others. The art of making others happy is one of the cardinal lessons of human life, and the fireside of winter is its best teacher. How the prattle of the children, the commonplace details of family incidents, the daily narratives of the school-boy, the free interchange of easy thought—how they build up the strength of domestic ties and augment our patrimony of happiness! Now this simplicity of taste and pleasure—this quick and hearty response to the moods of companions and friends—is of great worth to the mind. Care, responsibility, and anxiety always tend to solitary thought and feeling. They turn us inward on ourselves and magnify our sense of individual importance. The fireside of winter awakens another spirit, calls for genial tempers, and compels us to participate in the heart and life of those around us. And then the festal gatherings of winter—what would Thanksgivings, Christmas, New Years, be at any other season? The cheerful fire, the family-dinner, the playful reminiscences, are all associated with winter, and enter largely into the joys which this beneficent season brings.
If you would enjoy winter learn to be agreeable at home. Sympathy is a nobler endowment than talent, and it enriches more than money. The fireside is the true school of sympathy. You must be a man there before you can be a man elsewhere. Wife and children can do more to form a really great character than all other human agencies. But do net confine your sympathies to home. Abroad in the suffering world you have the work of kindness and generosity to do. Winter is a sorrowful season to the poor and the destitute. Remember them, for their sad condition is an appeal from Heaven to your benevolence. If Christ numbered it among the evidences of his divinity that the poor had the Gospel preached to them, you should esteem it as one of the highest exercises of your intellectual and moral capacity to feed and clothe them. We can not work miracles; but if humanity ever seizes the true spirit of miracles, absorbing its divineness into itself and thus reaching the very altitude of its being, it is when it follows the Redeemer and seeks to benefit the afflicted. Our own hearts need the offices of charity to act on them quite as much as the poverty-stricken, and, by means of the wretchedness around us, winter affords us signal opportunities to improve our character as well as to promote the comfort of the unfortunate.
Thanks, then, for winter! Thanks for its life, in-doors and out-of-doors! If landscape and sky are not so beautiful, why feel the absence of summer pomp and autumn glory, if landscape and sky are not so beautiful, why feel the absence of summer pomp and autumn glory, if Heaven comes nearer to our hearts? Nearer it does come, for it forsakes the outward world to enter the selecter world in our own homes. The voice of singing birds and the flow of musical waters are hushed in the forest and meadow, but a gladder melody chants its joys around the fireside. Sunshine decks not plain and hillside in their variegated colors, but a lovelier light illumines the walls of home, and in its radiance we sit contented and happy. Winter is the Sabbath season of domestic peace, and, as such, blesses the world with its richest bliss.