n America; a love of the beautiful is beginning to unfold its
wings; but what kind of art, and what kind of beauty? Are we to fill our
houses with pictures and gems, and to see that even our drinking cup and
vase is wrought in graceful pattern, and to lose our reverence for
self-denial, honor, and faith?

Is our Venus to be the frail, insnaring Aphrodite, or the starry, divine
Urania?

OUR WOOD LOT IN WINTER.

Our wood lot! Yes, we have arrived at the dignity of owning a wood lot,
and for us simple folk there is something invigorating in the thought.
To OWN even a small spot of our dear old mother earth hath in it a
relish of something stimulating to human nature. To own a meadow, with
all its thousand-fold fringes of grasses, its broidery of monthly
flowers, and its outriders of birds, and bees, and gold-winged
insects--this is something that establishes one's heart. To own a clover
patch or a buckwheat field is like possessing a self-moving manufactory
for perfumes and sweetness; but a wood lot, rustling with dignified old
trees--it makes a man rise in his own esteem; he might take off his hat
to himself at the moment of acquisition.

We do not marvel that the land-acquiring passion becomes a mania among
our farmers, and particularly we do not wonder at a passion for wood
land. That wide, deep chasm of conscious self-poverty and emptiness
which lies at the bottom of every human heart, making men crave property
as something to add to one's own bareness, and to ballast one's own
specific levity, is sooner filled by land than any thing else.

Your hoary New England farmer walks over his acres with a grim
satisfaction. He sets his foot down with a hard stamp; _here_ is
reality. No moonshine bank stock! no swindling railroads! _Here_ is
_his_ bank, and there is no defaulter here. All is true, solid, and
satisfactory; he seems anchored to this life by it. So Pope, with fine
tact, makes the old miser, making his will on his death bed, after
parting with every thing, die, clinging to the possession of his _land_.
He disposes with many a groan of this and that house, and this and that
stock and security; but at last the _manor_ is proposed to him.

"The manor! hold!" he cried,
"Not that; _I cannot part with that!_"--and died!

In such terms we discoursed yesterday, Herr Professor and myself, while
jogging along in an old-fashioned chaise to inspect a few acres of wood
lot, the acquisition of which