In sheltered corners of that
truculent instrument for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few
among the many begin to grow the violets of tender sentiment, the
early greens of yearning. The poet feels the sap of the new year
before the marsh-willow. He blossoms in advance of the catkins. Man
is greater than Nature. The poet is greater than man: he is nature
on two legs, - ambulatory.
At first there is no appearance of conflict. The winter garrison
seems to have withdrawn. The invading hosts of the South are
entering without opposition. The hard ground softens; the sun lies
warm upon the southern bank, and water oozes from its base. If you
examine the buds of the lilac and the flowering shrubs, you cannot
say that they are swelling; but the varnish with which they were
coated in the fall to keep out the frost seems to be cracking. If
the sugar-maple is hacked, it will bleed, - the pure white blood of
Nature.
At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect:
its color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a
caterpillar on the footpath, and turn out for him. The house-fly thaws
out; a company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber-window.
It is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised. A flock of
millers, born out of time, flutter in. It is most unusual weather for
the season: it is so every year. The delusion is complete, when, on a
mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle-brattle chorus on the
edge of the pond. The citizen asks his neighbor, "Did you hear the
frogs last night?" That seems to open the new world. One thinks of his
childhood and its innocence, and of his first loves. It fills one with
sentiment and a tender longing, this voice of the tree-toad. Man is a
strange being. Deaf to the prayers of friends, to the sermons and
warnings of the church, to the calls of duty, to the pleadings of his
better nature, he is touched by the tree-toad. The signs of the spring
multiply. The passer in the street in the evening sees the maid-servant
leaning on the area-gate in sweet converse with some one leaning on the
other side; or in the park, which is still too damp for anything but
true affection, he sees her seated by the side of one who is able to
protect her from the policeman, and hears her sigh, "How sweet it is to
be with those we love to be with!"
All this is very well; but next morning the newspaper nips these
early buds of sentiment. The telegraph announces, "Twenty feet of
snow at Ogden, on the Pacific Road; winds blowing a gale at Omaha,
and snow still falling; mercury frozen at Duluth; storm-signals at
Port Huron."
Where now are your tree-toads, your young love, your early season?
Before noon it rains, by three o'clock it hails; before night the
bleak storm-cloud of the northwest envelops the sky; a gale is
raging, whirling about a tempest of snow. By morning the snow is
drifted in banks, and two feet deep on a level. Early in the
seventeenth century, Drebbel of Holland invented the weather-glass.
Before that, men had suffered without knowing the degree of their
suffering. A century later, Romer hit upon the idea of using mercury
in a thermometer; and Fahrenheit constructed the instrument which
adds a new because distinct terror to the weather. Science names and
registers the ills of life; and yet it is a gain to know the names
and habits of our enemies. It is with some satisfaction in our
knowledge that we say the thermometer marks zero.
In fact, the wild beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and
taken possession of New England. Nature, giving up her melting mood,
has retired into dumbness and white stagnation. But we are wise. We
say it is better to have it now than later. We have a conceit of
understanding things.
The sun is in alliance with the earth. Between the two the snow is
uncomfortable. Compelled to go, it decides to go suddenly. The
first day there is slush with rain; the second day, mud with hail;
the third day a flood with sunshine. The thermometer declares that
the temperature is delightful. Man shivers and sneezes. His
neighbor dies of some disease newly named by science; but he dies all
the same as if it hadn't been newly named. Science has not
discovered any name that is not fatal.
This is called the breaking-up of winter.
Nature seems for some days to be in doubt, not exactly able to stand
still, not daring to put forth anything tender. Man says that the
worst is over. If he should live a thousand years, he would be
deceived every year. And this is called an age of skepticism. Man
never believed in so many things as now: he never believed so much in
himself. As to Nature, he knows her secrets: he can predict what she
will do. He communicates with the next world by means of an alphabet
which he has invented. He talks with souls at the other end of the
spirit-wire. To be sure, neither of them says anything; but they
talk. Is not that something? He suspends the law of gravitation as
to his own body - he has learned how to evade it - as tyrants suspend
the legal writs of habeas corpus. When Gravitation asks for his
body, she cannot have it. He says of himself, "I am infallible; I am
sublime." He believes all these things. He is master of the
elements. Shakespeare sends him a poem just made, and as good a poem
as the man could write himself.
