nsense;" but she afterwards told the Mistress that there
were emotions that one could never put into words without the danger
of being ridiculous; a profound truth. And yet I should not like to say
that there is not a tender lonesomeness in love that can get comfort out
of a night-bird in a cloud, if there be such a thing. Analysis is the
death of sentiment.

But to return to the winds. Certain people impress us as the winds do.
Mandeville never comes in that I do not feel a north-wind vigor and
healthfulness in his cordial, sincere, hearty manner, and in his
wholesome way of looking at things. The Parson, you would say, was the
east wind, and only his intimates know that his peevishness is only a
querulous humor. In the fair west wind I know the Mistress herself, full
of hope, and always the first one to discover a bit of blue in a cloudy
sky. It would not be just to apply what I have said of the south wind to
any of our visitors, but it did blow a little while Herbert was here.

II

In point of pure enjoyment, with an intellectual sparkle in it, I
suppose that no luxurious lounging on tropical isles set in tropical
seas compares with the positive happiness one may have before a great
woodfire (not two sticks laid crossways in a grate), with a veritable
New England winter raging outside. In order to get the highest
enjoyment, the faculties must be alert, and not be lulled into a mere
recipient dullness. There are those who prefer a warm bath to a brisk
walk in the inspiring air, where ten thousand keen influences minister
to the sense of beauty and run along the excited nerves. There are,
for instance, a sharpness of horizon outline and a delicacy of color
on distant hills which are wanting in summer, and which convey to one
rightly organized the keenest delight, and a refinement of enjoyment
that is scarcely sensuous, not at all sentimental, and almost passing
the intellectual line into the spiritual.

I was speaking to Mandeville about this, and he said that I was drawing
it altogether too fine; that he experienced sensations of pleasure in
being out in almost all weathers; that he rather liked to breast a north
wind, and that there was a certain inspiration in sharp outlines and
in a landscape in trim winter-quarters, with stripped trees, and, as it
were, scudding through the season under bare poles; but that he must say
that he preferred the weather in which he could sit on the fence by
the wood-lot, wi