All this is very well; but next morning the newspaper nips these early buds of sentiment.  The telegraph announces, “Twenty feet of snow at Ogden, on the Pacific Road; winds blowing a gale at Omaha, and snow still falling; mercury frozen at Duluth; storm-signals at Port Huron.”

Where now are your tree-toads, your young love, your early season?  Before noon it rains, by three o’clock it hails; before night the bleak storm-cloud of the northwest envelops the sky; a gale is raging, whirling about a tempest of snow.  By morning the snow is drifted in banks, and two feet deep on a level.  Early in the seventeenth century, Drebbel of Holland invented the weather-glass.  Before that, men had suffered without knowing the degree of their suffering.  A century later, Romer hit upon the idea of using mercury in a thermometer; and Fahrenheit constructed the instrument which adds a new because distinct terror to the weather.  Science names and registers the ills of life; and yet it is a gain to know the names and habits of our enemies.  It is with some satisfaction in our knowledge that we say the thermometer marks zero.

In fact, the wild beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and taken possession of New England.  Nature, giving up her melting mood, has retired into dumbness and white stagnation.  But we are wise.  We say it is better to have it now than later.  We have a conceit of understanding things.

The sun is in alliance with the earth.  Between the two the snow is uncomfortable.  Compelled to go, it decides to go suddenly.  The first day there is slush with rain; the second day, mud with hail; the third day a flood with sunshine.  The thermometer declares that the temperature is delightful.  Man shivers and sneezes.  His neighbor dies of some disease newly named by science; but he dies all the same as if it hadn’t been newly named.  Science has not discovered any name that is not fatal.

This is called the breaking-up of winter.

Nature seems for some days to be in doubt, not exactly able to stand still, not daring to put forth anything tender.  Man says that the worst is over.  If he should live a thousand years, he would be deceived every year.  And this is called an age of skepticism.  Man never believed in so many things as now:  he never believed so much in himself.  As to Nature, he knows her secrets:  he can predict what she will do.  He communicates with the next world by means of an alphabet which he has invented.  He talks with souls at the other end of the spirit-wire.  To be sure, neither of them says anything; but they talk.  Is not that something?  He suspends the law of gravitation as to his own body—­he has learned how to evade it—­as tyrants suspend the legal writs of habeas corpus.  When Gravitation asks for his body, she cannot have it.  He says of himself, “I am infallible; I am sublime.”  He believes all these things.  He is master of the elements.  Shakespeare sends him a poem just