Project Gutenberg's Some Winter Days in Iowa, by Frederick John Lazell

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Title: Some Winter Days in Iowa

Author: Frederick John Lazell

Release Date: April 14, 2006 [EBook #18174]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Some Winter Days in Iowa

BY

Frederick John Lazell

CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA
THE TORCH PRESS
NINETEEN HUNDRED SEVEN

COPYRIGHT, 1907
BY
FRED J. LAZELL.

1907

FOREWORD

I am glad to have the privilege, thus in advance, of looking over Mr.
Lazell's delightful essays. He has surely a gift in this sort of
thing. We are grateful to the man who shows us what he sees in Nature,
but more to the man who like our present author shows us how easy and
blessed it is to see for ourselves.

Mr. Lazell reminds me of Thoreau and Emerson, and I can suggest no
better foreword than the passage from the last named author, from the
_Method of Nature_, as follows:

"Every earnest glance we give to the realities around us with intent
to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse and is really songs of praise.
What difference can it make whether it take the shape of exhortation,
or of passionate exclamation, or of scientific statement? These are
forms merely. Through them we express, at last, the fact that God has
done thus or thus."

THOMAS H. MACBRIDE

IOWA CITY, IOWA
OCTOBER 17, 1907

I. THE WOODLANDS IN JANUARY

Humanity has always turned to nature for relief from toil and strife.
This was true of the old world; it is much more true of the new,
especially in recent years. There is a growing interest in wild things
and wild places. The benedicite of the Druid woods, always appreciated
by the few, like Lowell, is coming to be understood by the many. There
is an increasing desire to get away from the roar and rattle of the
streets, away from even the prim formality of suburban avenues and
artificial bits of landscape gardening into the panorama of w