Simmering

“ The cold, of course, is something to remember; so is the night on the straw when every available thread of clothing seems not half enough; the cooking of dinner and breakfast on a fire of wood; the wild desolation of winter that the moon shines on outside, and the sunrise in the morning that reveals a world the gods have just that very second turned out in marvellous, white detail. ”

“ The night of the big wind was followed by a day and a night of gusts of wind and sleety rain; then followed a day and a night of rising clouds, then a day when the clouds were scattered and the sun was cold. That day the sunset was grim, white, and freezing cold.
In the morning there was a bright, warm sunrise, a breath of sweet, soft air, and unimaginable brightness and buoyancy, birds singing, squirrels barking, and all the dismal pangs banished. ”

“ For dreary melancholy
⁠Is no good company.
O who can smile in summer,
⁠When winter rules their heart?—
When pleading Ups grow dumb, or
⁠Clasped hands fall apart?
White cheeks more chill than snowing. ”

“ Rarely did the dull gray of the sky dim the glory of a whole day, and the short summer showers, freshening the beauty of the landscape and abating the fervid heat of mid-summer, seemed only too infrequent. And above all, the pure, free, upland air, that gives vigor and health to the body, joy and lightness to the heart, almost annihilates distance to the eye; and in breathing which, one drinks into the lungs the very wine of life. ”

“ AS we sit by our firesides and peer into the glowing coals, or watch the bright jets of flame spring into existence to throw their cheery light into the room, making weird, fantastic shadows on the wall, and bringing with them such comforting cheer to our senses of sight and feeling, we are often brought into very reflective moods, especially if we are sitting in the twilight, while the cold wind is whistling, and the sharp snow and hail of winter are clicking against the windows. ”

“ But, to come back to the larger things of the out-of-doors, you should see the mist some summer morning very early or some summer evening, sheeted and still over a winding stream or pond, especially in the evening when the sun has gone down behind the hill, the flame has faded from the sky, and over the rim of the circling slopes pours the soft, cool twilight, with a breeze as soft and cool, and a spirit that is prayer. ”

“ During a mild day, at some such spot, we can almost delude ourselves into thinking that spring is coming; but on the morrow a fierce wind rattles the bare branches above you, clouds of stinging dust, or driving snow, fill the chilled air, and not a bird is to be seen or heard, the cheery sights and sounds of yesterday having given place to a dreariness most drear. ”

“ What is that shiver which tells us, spite of fires and closed doors, that the turn of the night has come; that chill which creeps through the body, even in the summer time, if we are keeping our solitary watch by the sick-bed, or travelling hour after hour through the darkness? ”

“ But our nights are cool; our early mornings even chill, and thus nature is refreshed: only, this does not occur during the periods of scirocco; then, night and day, the heat lies like a heavy garment round our limbs. ”

“ It is not that summer atmosphere, full of alternations of haze and fervent clearness, as if Nature were calling into life every day some influence for its myriad children; sometimes in showers, and sometimes with coercive heat upon root and leaf; and, like a universal [113] task-master, was driving up the hours to accomplish the labors of the year.
3. No! In these autumn days there is a sense of leisure and of meditation. The sun seems to look down upon the labors of its fiery hands with complacency. ”

“ For well the sighing summer gales do love
To play upon them. Often have I heard,
When in sweet freshness came the gentle shower,
That pensive music at the fall of eve,
And blest it in my loneliness of soul. ”

“ The day had been moderately warm, and the sun-distilled odors of the firs and pines, condensed by the coolness of twilight, were filling the air with an agreeable perfume, as though Nature was burning incense in the celebration of some ancient rite, during which every living and breathing thing about seemed bowed in silent reverence. ”

“ With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and slumber comes,—a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly; and perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such a numbness, such a torpor, that only by the most intense effort can you keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will had ebbed away,—all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the night.... ”

“ Another of the symptoms of the approaching season which has, at least to us, a very pleasing effect, consists in the bursts of solemn minstrelsy by which we are aroused from our slumbers in the still hour of the winter nights, or which, failing to break our sleep, mingle with our dreams, leading us into scenes of enchantment, and filling them with unearthly music. ”

“ The scorching heat of a midsummer day beat mercilessly upon the earth. Travelers on the dusty roads, toilers in the fields, and others exposed to the rays of the sun, thought yearningly of cooling winds and running streams. ”

“ The sighing summer-wind forgets to blow.
As sinks the day-star in the rosy West,
The silent wave, with rich reflection glows:
Alas! can tranquil nature give me rest,
Or scenes of beauty sooth me to repose? ”

“ The dews of spring fall, summer's vapours fade away, and it is the pure atmosphere of autumn which clearly reveals the distant landscape, and then finally earthly existence is swallowed in the night of winter. ”

“ But when daylight's haughty glare has faded, and spring has modestly shrouded its loveliness in a veil of grey, these wretches inhaling its fragrance in their seclusion come forth from their concealment, into the soothing twilight, among the dewy blossoms, and once more give utterance to the yearning that has so long been mute, rejoicing with tears in their old anguish, crying: "Oh Spring, oh youth--even thy falsehood was lovely--" thus doing it homage by their grief, for spring has no enemies. ”

“ Hour followed hour and day followed day, remorselessly, while we lay there, hours and days which we could measure only by the steady circling of the sunlight that slanted through our tiny windows. With each night came cold, a bitter cold that penetrated to our bones, and for all the red splendor of the dying sun above, the days were far from warm. ”

“ The odor of smouldering heaps of burning brush and weeds, or of tardily burnt tobacco-plant beds, is all that as yet scents the breeze. But after a month of frost and rain and snow and clouds, the breath is the breath of spring, and the glow of the sun, now bursting through the clouds, seems no longer the sickly glare of winter. ”

“ They felt that spring was theirs too, as it was—glory as fair as brief—with promise as a beginning and storm and desolation as an ending; like two trees that put forth green leaves in the sunshine, only later to have them torn and destroyed, and they themselves fall stricken by the storm to earth. ”

“ His Winter and twilight cry expresses for most men both the sadness and the wildness of these solitudes. When his Spring cry breaks every now and then, [150] as it does to-day, through the songs of the larks, when the rooks caw in low flight or perched on their elm tops, and the lambs bleat, and the sun shines, and the couch fires burn well, and the wind blows their smoke about, the Plain is genial, and the unkindly breadth and simplicity of the scene in Winter or in the drought of Summer are forgotten. ”

“ A single day amid surroundings where there are such infinite possibilities of change in cloud and storm, heat and cold, the dazzling glare of noon, or the calm romantic light of a full moon, and the slow progress of the seasons, gives but one picture, a single mood from out a thousand, and it may perchance be the very worst of all. ”

“ The red midsummer of blazing heat.
When the sun, like an eye that never closes,
Bends on the earth its fervid gaze,
And the winds are still, and the crimson roses
Droop and wither and die in its rays. ”

“ But soon the frost is creeping down through the stones and earth overhead, the rains are filling the outer doorways and shutting off the supply of fresh air; and one day, though not sound sleepers, the family cuddle down and forget to wake entirely until the frost has begun to creep back toward the surface, and in through the softened soil is felt the thrill of the waking spring. ”

“ Thus did we cast ourselves down—as the dreary shades of night came over us, with a deeper and drearier cloud than ever,—not seeking sleep, but seized upon by it, as it were, to save us from the suffering, akin to madness, which must haply follow upon our fearful waking thoughts. ”

“ Full of an umber twilight,
I beheld that larger world;
Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine
Above, but low in the clefts it thickened,
Dull as with duskier tincture.
Like whimsical wings outspread but unstirring,
Flowers that seemed spirits of the twilight
That must pass with its passing—
Too fragile for day or for darkness,
Fed the dusk with more delicate hues than its own ”

“ A few bare- footed people moved by in silence, and the brown monotony, the comforting warmth of the hot midday sun, and the quivering heat-rays in the air, soon gave an eerie, unreal look to things, a strange, hazy, hypnotic effect, a sense of dreamy spell. ”

“ There were none of those signs in the animal world outside, of premature stir and cheerful awaking, that in other lands help the illusion that winter lies behind, but there was that even more stimulating sweet air abroad, that subtle mixture of sun and yielding frost, that softened wind that comes blowing across the snow, still keen to the cheek, but subtly reviving to the sensitive nostril, and caressing to the eyes. ”

“ Days of spring and of mere pleasure in existence have alternated with days of gloom and loneliness, of melancholy, of resignation. Our mental pictures of the place are tinged by many moods, as the landscape is beheld in shower and sunshine, in frost, and in the colourless drizzling weather. ”

“ But how much stiller than still, when the earth has drawn over its shoulders that morning mist that allows of no slightest breath—when under the haze the very air seems to lie curled and to have gone to sleep. ”

“ I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime. ”

“ Most people know the One Night of each hot weather—that still, clouded night just before the Rains break, when there seems to be no more breathable air under the bowl of the pitiless skies, and all the weight of the silent, dark house lies on the chest of the sleep-hunter. ”

“ The golden Summer, as a dream foregone
Is changed—till in our eyes the ashen dawn
Of Autumn kindles.**** We have heard thy wing
But with a sound of sighing; heart on heart,
In our own sighs we hear thy wing depart. ”

“ Every hour the sun looks more and more askance upon it, and the winds, those summer flatterers, come to it less fawningly. Every breath shakes down showers of its leafy attire, leaving it gradually barer and barer, for the blasts of winter to blow through it. ”

“ Though I like the early summer best, yet I can admire the clear winter sky, and the dazzling expanse of white that robes the whole earth as if in ermine, and even the autumnal storm with its fierce blast, loaded with sleet, and hail, and withered leaves. ”

“ The alternate heat of the day and cold of the night—a cold which is often great, owing to the radiation into a cloudless sky—split the masses by alternate expansion and contraction, make great flakes peel off them like the coats of an onion, and give them these singularly picturesque shapes. ”

“ Who among the wisest and the best, has not experienced states of feeling when the light sigh of the summer breeze, or the gentle pattering of midnight rain, or mayhap a passing shadow on the moonlight floor, or the rustling of the trees, as they bowed their foliage to the evening gale, has had power to quicken the pulse, and restrain the motion of the breath? ”

“ I fear not the sun, that cannot melt me, nor the frost that is not able to make me crumble. Cold or hot, in summer or in winter time, I remain unchanged. The clouds come and go, but they cannot move me. ”

“ To such extremes has this faculty, when distorted, hurried its unhappy subjects, that they have endured the severest mortification, denied themselves the common benefits of nature, exposed themselves to the keenest edge of winter’s cold, and the most scorching rays of summer’s heat, and indulged their distempered fancies in the wildest chimeras. ”

“ There are certain summer evenings when nature produces a poetic, emotionalizing mood. Life seems to talk to you in soft whispers of wonderful things it is doing. Marshes and pools, if you encounter any, exhale a mystic breath. ”

“ It seems to lift my soul, to make my heart bound with joy and the wildest delight. I know nothing so delightful as storm and thunder. I look, and see the tall trees shivering and going down with a roar, and feel that I could sing—sing aloud—and believe that there are voices, like mine, then singing through all the tempest. ”

“ How often the wind falls to a breeze, heat-tempering, grateful, which comes in fits and starts, not severe enough to chill, yet long enough to cool the body weary of the summer heats, with a sense of grateful relief. ”

“ What yearning, what hopes, what anticipations usher in this feast of feasts! Winter, with its manifold hardships, is past. Nature awakes from her frigid lethargy, and the balmy air gives promise of renewed life and happiness. ”

“ The cold weather, the bitter wind and the ragged dress are not favorable to such sleep. Only they can sleep as these do, who are exhausted. Their faces, especially that of the child, are already blue from cold and the tiny limbs tremble like frozen jelly. ”