with the actual appearance of a tract of some red-hot substance, on a mountain ridge which received the full light of the sinking sun, no longer visible from below.
This second phase of January is by far the best. In the midst of it, we find ourselves, as is fitting, in the very coldest part of the year. Some wise people tell us that the 12th is, on the whole, the proper day to feel the extremity of English cold. We find the wind generally in the north or north-east, and the rain diminishing, after diligently replenishing the springs since September; and the days are not only lengthening, but becoming brighter while they last. The mists do not so completely fill the air, but rather float in horizontal sheets in the valleys, and lie low on the plains. In a mountainous country, one may now see the singular spectacle of a complete filling of a valley with pure white mist, that looks like a floor to walk upon. The opposite hills seem to be within a few yards, so that the very resident is puzzled, till some wooded knoll or rocky promontory shows itself above the surface, and helps to rectify the proportions of the scene.
If the third phase should follow, there is an end to the pleasures of the time, as far as they depend on the weather. If the wind goes round to the south-west or south, after the snowfall, we have rain and a rapid thaw, and (owing to our mismanagement) those disastrous floods which cost us so many lives, so much health, and so much food every year. Every country-gentleman who, like myself, has witnessed floods, and their causes and consequences, for a long series of years, is sick of the very thought of them. Not one inundation in fifty is at all necessary: and most of them are wantonly incited. I have observed how they have increased in my time; and I grow more and more disgusted every year at the apathy with which the nation sees the churchyards filling fast in flooded districts, the land turning into a swamp behind weirs, the banks of rivers falling in, the channels filling up; and all the land on both sides sending down streams through thousands of drain-pipes, while nothing is done to provide main channels and outfalls adequate to the relief of the land.
As a stir is at last making to obtain aid from the law, I will say no more now. The experience of last January, with its vicissitudes of weather, reflecting the peculiarity of the whole winter of 1859-60, ought to be enough to warn us against ever again allowing rapid and extreme alternations of weather to do us more mischief than is unavoidable. It should not be in the power of a speedy thaw after snow to lay under water more than a very small proportion of the soil of Great Britain; but while we let our low-lying rivers swell to the level of their banks in ordinary weather, and descending streams choke their own channels, we must expect drowned lands, diseased cattle, damp dwellings, the sweep of the fever, and a rheumatic and consumptive labouring population. If the passing-bell is always mournful, it becomes more and more so as age teaches us how wilfully and wantonly many are sent to the grave. On a winter afternoon, when earth and sky are grey, and there is not a speck of cheer in the whole landscape, except, perhaps, the red spark and yellow smoke of the forge below, the toll of the passing-bell strikes upon the heart. If we know it to be an aged person who is gone, the emotion is far from painful: but the probability is that some one has been prematurely cut off, through ignorance and apathy of some kind, when not from guilt; and this month the sound is singularly pathetic. The bells have but just rung in a new year of human life when, from the same steeple, comes the notice that some one has already dropped out of it.
There are some regulated pleasures this month; as the Twelfth Night celebrations, Plough Monday, and the holiday hunting from the Squire’s mansion. We see the shops gay and tempting with Twelfth-cakes, and all manner of garnishing. We see the rural labourers, in old-fashioned districts, feasting and dancing to celebrate the first act of tillage for the new year. On dry mornings, when a touch of frost edges with rime the brown oak leaves and the green laurel, or the shining ivy, we hear the well-known tramp on the resounding road, and see the scarlet-coated gentry converging towards the meet; and great is the fun when every lad who has a pony, and every bird-boy who can command a donkey for an hour, scampers off to swell the rout.
Thus the weeks pass. Those which are packed most full of holiday pleasures must come to an end: and then is heard upon the road the other well-known tramp,—that of the coach team which conveys schoolboys in their season to the station whence they start for school. There is no use in dwelling on the parting, or on the dullness of the house for the rest of the day when Ned and Charley are gone.
NEW YEAR’S EVE.
Goodbye, strange year, so fierce and yet so tender—
So hot with battle and so blind with tears;
To-day is thine, to-night the Almighty Lender
Resumes thee back into the timeless years:
Goodbye!
Not in a waste of sheeted snow thou diest,
Nor ’mid tumultuous echoes of the deep;
Grey placid evening folds thee where thou liest,
And modest airs caress thee into sleep:
Goodbye!
How calm a death for such insatiate warrior!
But sternest souls and maddest in the fray
Oft, ere they float beyond life’s viewless barrier,
Reveal to love their chasten’d eyes, and say
Goodbye!
So, leave a blessing ere thou part for heaven;
Tell the fond earth she is not always thus;
Let some kind spirit with the morn be given,
And not to her alone, but ah, to us—
Goodbye!
To us, who long to go where thou art going,
To rise from self, and be for ever free;
To see the land with milk and honey flowing,
And say to memory, as we say to thee,
Goodbye!
