II

In point of pure enjoyment, with an intellectual sparkle in it, I
suppose that no luxurious lounging on tropical isles set in tropical
seas compares with the positive happiness one may have before a great
woodfire (not two sticks laid crossways in a grate), with a veritable
New England winter raging outside. In order to get the highest
enjoyment, the faculties must be alert, and not be lulled into a mere
recipient dullness. There are those who prefer a warm bath to a
brisk walk in the inspiring air, where ten thousand keen influences
minister to the sense of beauty and run along the excited nerves.
There are, for instance, a sharpness of horizon outline and a
delicacy of color on distant hills which are wanting in summer, and
which convey to one rightly organized the keenest delight, and a
refinement of enjoyment that is scarcely sensuous, not at all
sentimental, and almost passing the intellectual line into the
spiritual.

I was speaking to Mandeville about this, and he said that I was
drawing it altogether too fine; that he experienced sensations of
pleasure in being out in almost all weathers; that he rather liked to
breast a north wind, and that there was a certain inspiration in
sharp outlines and in a landscape in trim winter-quarters, with
stripped trees, and, as it were, scudding through the season under
bare poles; but that he must say that he preferred the weather in
which he could sit on the fence by the wood-lot, with the spring sun