윈터 겨울.Winter, by Dallas Lore Sharp
AS in The Fall of the Year, so here in Winter, the second volume of this series, I
have tried by story and sketch and suggestion to catch the spirit of the season.
In this volume it is the large, free, strong, fierce, wild soul of Winter which I
would catch, the bitter boreal might that, out of doors, drives all before it; that
challenges all that is wild and fierce and strong and free and large within us, till
the bounding red blood belts us like an equator, and the glow of all the tropics
blooms upon our faces and down into the inmost of our beings.
Winter within us means vitality and purpose and throbbing life; and without us in
our fields and woods it means widened prospect, the storm of battle, the
holiness of peace, the poetry of silence and darkness and emptiness and death.
And I have tried throughout this volume to show that Winter is only a symbol,
that death is only an appearance, that life is everywhere, and that everywhere
life dominates even while it lies buried under the winding- sheet of the snow.
“ A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
What should it know of death?”
Why, this at least, that the winter world is not dead; that the cold is powerless
to destroy; that life flees and hides and sleeps, only to waken again, forever
stronger than death―fresher, fairer, sweeter for its long winter rest.
But first of all, and always, I have tried here to be a naturalist and nature- lover,
pointing out the sounds and sights, the things to do, the places to visit, the
how and why, that the children may know the wild life of winter, and through
that knowledge come to love winter for its own sake.
And they will love it. Winter seems to have been made especially for children.
They do not have rheumatism. Let the old people hurry off down South, but turn
the children loose in the snow. The sight of a snowstorm affects a child as the
smell of catnip affects a cat. He wants to roll over and over and over in it. And
he should roll in it; the snow is his element as it is a polar bear cub’s.
I love the winter, and so do all children―its bare fields, empty woods, flattened
meadows, its ranging landscapes, its stirless silences, its tumult of storms, its
crystal nights with stars new cut in the glittering sky, its challenge, defiance,
and mighty wrath. I love its wild life―its birds and animals; the shifts they make
to conquer death. And then, out of this winter watching, I love the gentleness
that comes, the sympathy, the understanding! One gets very close to the heart
of Nature through such understanding.
Dallas Lore Sharp.
MULLEIN HILL, March, 1912
