to abstract our eyes, for the time, from
all else. We can do this best when the scene from which the work was
studied is shut farthest away from sight. Summer landscapes themselves
are one thing, and we enjoy them in summer: such landscapes
utilized--they cannot be reproduced--by art, are another thing, and
these we enjoy at the winter fireside, when the eye sees nothing without
except leaden clouds and effacing snow. Not even the average American
would take a landscape-painting under his arm if he wished to get the
good of it, and go set it up in the glare of an open harvestfield or in
the darkness of a deep wood, although these objects may have made the
picture. He would enjoy Nature just as well, no doubt, during such a
proceeding, but would he get the good of art? What would the painter do
to the critic or buyer who subjected his work to such a test? Poison him
at the very least. And this is what the literary artist should complain
of, rather than desire, at the hands of an editor. He should not want
the little bit that he selected, narrowed, intensified, idealized, and
then imperfectly transcribed from memory, brought out and set up before
a reader whose eye is filled at every glance with the overpowering and
inexhaustible realities of Nature herself.

Just the thing to read in the blistering days of July, if anything can
be read then, is a graphic description of a snowstorm, or a lively
account of the way a polar bear invaded the ice-hut of a benumbed
Eskimo, or a history of the Washington Monument: something cold. Ice is
as grateful in your dog-day literature as in your August julep. No one
will hold that at such a time he prefers to contemplate a picture of
Sahara or of a frying-pan. On the same principle, let us have, in art,
our green leaves and warm colors amid the frosts of midwinter. Only the
atmospheric extremes, summer and winter, can be seriously considered in
"seasoning" periodical literature, the months our almanacs call spring
being neither one thing nor another. In capricious April, however, a
vision of golden and placid October would seem to be the proper thing,
as would the freshness of May in the mellow melancholy of autumn. If
editors receive more censures than compliments for publishing certain
articles, into which the element of "news" does not enter, six months
after the seasons of which they treat, there is one obscure contributor
at least who considers the necessity a virtue.

C. H.