plunge. It is the insidious temptation that assails us when we are
braced up to profit by the invigorating rigor of winter.

Perhaps the influence of the four great winds on character is only a
fancied one; but it is evident on temperament, which is not
altogether a matter of temperature, although the good old deacon used
to say, in his humble, simple way, that his third wife was a very
good woman, but her "temperature was very different from that of the
other two." The north wind is full of courage, and puts the stamina
of endurance into a man, and it probably would into a woman too if
there were a series of resolutions passed to that effect. The west
wind is hopeful; it has promise and adventure in it, and is, except
to Atlantic voyagers America-bound, the best wind that ever blew.
The east wind is peevishness; it is mental rheumatism and grumbling,
and curls one up in the chimney-corner like a cat. And if the
chimney ever smokes, it smokes when the wind sits in that quarter.
The south wind is full of longing and unrest, of effeminate
suggestions of luxurious ease, and perhaps we might say of modern
poetry,--at any rate, modern poetry needs a change of air. I am not
sure but the south is the most powerful of the winds, because of its
sweet persuasiveness. Nothing so stirs the blood in spring, when it
comes up out of the tropical latitude; it makes men "longen to gon on
pilgrimages."

I did intend to insert here a little poem (as it is quite proper to
do in an essay) on the south wind, composed by the Young Lady Staying
With Us, beginning,--

"Out of a drifting southern cloud
My soul heard the night-bird cry,"