politics. I was about to say that, however it
may be with sunshine, one is always grateful for his wood-fire, because
he does not maintain it without some cost.

Yet I cannot but confess to a difference between sunlight and the light
of a wood-fire. The sunshine is entirely untamed. Where it rages most
freely it tends to evoke the brilliancy rather than the harmonious
satisfactions of nature. The monstrous growths and the flaming colors
of the tropics contrast with our more subdued loveliness of foliage and
bloom. The birds of the middle region dazzle with their contrasts of
plumage, and their voices are for screaming rather than singing. I
presume the new experiments in sound would project a macaw's voice
in very tangled and inharmonious lines of light. I suspect that the
fiercest sunlight puts people, as well as animals and vegetables, on
extremes in all ways. A wood-fire on the hearth is a kindler of the
domestic virtues. It brings in cheerfulness, and a family center, and,
besides, it is artistic. I should like to know if an artist could ever
represent on canvas a happy family gathered round a hole in the floor
called a register. Given a fireplace, and a tolerable artist could
almost create a pleasant family round it. But what could he conjure out
of a register? If there was any virtue among our ancestors,--and they
labored under a great many disadvantages, and had few of the aids which
we have to excellence of life,--I am convinced they drew it mostly from
the fireside. If it was difficult to read the eleven commandments by the
light of a pine-knot, it was not difficult to get the sweet spirit
of them from the countenance of the serene mother knitting in the
chimney-corner.

III

When the fire is made, you want to sit in front of it and grow genial in
its effulgence. I have never been upon a throne,--except in moments of a
traveler's curiosity, about as long as a South American dictator remains
on one,--but I have no idea that it compares, for pleasantness, with a
seat before a wood-fire. A whole leisure day before you, a good novel
in hand, and the backlog only just beginning to kindle, with uncounted
hours of comfort in it, has life anything more delicious? For "novel"
you can substitute "Calvin's Institutes," if you wish to be virtuous
as well as happy. Even Calvin would melt before a wood-fire. A great
snowstorm, visible on three sides of your wide-windowed room, loading
the evergreens, blown in fine