Backlog Studies | Page 6

furnishes the room. And it is never twice the same. In this respect it is
like the landscape-view through a window, always seen in a new light,
color, or condition. The fireplace is a window into the most charming
world I ever had a glimpse of.
Yet direct heat is an agreeable sensation. I am not scientific enough to
despise it, and have no taste for a winter residence on Mount
Washington, where the thermometer cannot be kept comfortable even
by boiling. They say that they say in Boston that there is a satisfaction
in being well dressed which religion cannot give. There is certainly a
satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hickory fire which is not to be
found in the fieriest blasts of a furnace. The hot air of a furnace is a
sirocco; the heat of a wood-fire is only intense sunshine, like that
bottled in Lacrimae Christi. Besides this, the eye is delighted, the sense
of smell is regaled by the fragrant decomposition, and the ear is pleased
with the hissing, crackling, and singing,--a liberation of so many
out-door noises. Some people like the sound of bubbling in a boiling
pot, or the fizzing of a frying-spider. But there is nothing gross in the
animated crackling of sticks of wood blazing on the earth, not even if

chestnuts are roasting in the ashes. All the senses are ministered to, and
the imagination is left as free as the leaping tongues of flame.
The attention which a wood-fire demands is one of its best
recommendations. We value little that which costs us no trouble to
maintain. If we had to keep the sun kindled up and going by private
corporate action, or act of Congress, and to be taxed for the support of
customs officers of solar heat, we should prize it more than we do. Not
that I should like to look upon the sun as a job, and have the proper
regulation of its temperature get into politics, where we already have so
much combustible stuff; but we take it quite too much as a matter of
course, and, having it free, do not reckon it among the reasons for
gratitude. Many people shut it out of their houses as if it were an enemy,
watch its descent upon the carpet as if it were only a thief of color, and
plant trees to shut it away from the mouldering house. All the animals
know better than this, as well as the more simple races of men; the old
women of the southern Italian coasts sit all day in the sun and ply the
distaff, as grateful as the sociable hens on the south side of a New
England barn; the slow tortoise likes to take the sun upon his sloping
back, soaking in color that shall make him immortal when the
imperishable part of him is cut up into shell ornaments. The capacity of
a cat to absorb sunshine is only equaled by that of an Arab or an
Ethiopian. They are not afraid of injuring their complexions.
White must be the color of civilization; it has so many natural
disadvantages. But this is 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