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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Summer is gone—winter is come . Which is the most enjoyable of the seasons ? is a common question . Unimpressible by the beauty p { any must he be who feels not that it is in the state which He receives each that its power of pleasure lies . The kind
of mind , and the state of mind , make spring of December , or of highest summer , winter . Autumn , the destroyer , has swept into eternity many a blossom both of flower and heart : its rich suns have set on the wrecks which its gales had made ; and its ripe harvest moon has lighted much both of animate and inanimate nature to * the bourne from whence no traveller returns . ' But
those setting suns and waning moons may also have been the signal for many a hope ' s spring , over which the howling blasts of the external world ' s wilderness pass unheeded , having no power but to say or sing soul take thy rest . ' And ' tis a fit time for the body , too , to take its rest in winter . Those curtains , with their heavy falling folds of purple drapery , whose graceful lines erst
harmonized so lovelily with the young , blooming green of drooping acacias , and the scarlet bells of the pendant fucia , the lady of the flowers , and by the moral effect of the entire satisfaction they gave to the sense of form and colour , showed forth the utility of beauty , —now reversing the order , make us glory in the beauty of utility , as , drawn closely to exclude the breath of evening , fold upon fold , they meet the downy carpet .
Yet would we rather be without bread than without flowers in the dreariest days of old December weather . Now that Cassiopeia , bright and beautiful , has taken herself away , chair and all ; and Bootes , outdoing the seven-leaguers of our redoubtable friend Jack the Giant Killer , has strode towards some other planet ; and the Snake , with its eyes of light , has
' trailed its slow length along , ' and vanished in * the dim obscure ;* and were the sky ever so clear , and the stars ever so bright , with their wakeful prying eyes , it is too cold to stay to look at them ; have we not laurestinus , white and pure as snow , but not as cold ; and holly , with its blood-red drops and crown of thorns like the occasion it commemorates ; and the passion-flower with its
exhausted colour and exaggerated form , fit emblem of its name ; and chrysanthemum , star-like , with the addition of fragrance , and with its shadows ( which it is a pity stars have not— -only the moral is good , that light has no shadow ) moving fantastically over the rose-tinted wall , as the fitful gleams of our beloved firelight
shoot up and fall as good as summer lightnings or northern meteors ? Firelight ! We would match fireli g ht against twilight for any number of pleasant sensations * We never could perceive the supereminent charm of English twilight ; it has always seemed to us but another name for darkness , and that not aiding intellectual
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THE SEASONS .
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825 '
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No . 72 . S If
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1832, page 825, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1826/page/33/
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