This relentless winter seems to stiffen and contract every nerve, and the frost is of that fierceness and intensity, that it penetrates even to the marrow of one's bones. One of the workmen told me yesterday, that on taking hold of an iron bar it had taken the skin off his hand, as if he had grasped it red hot: it is a favourite trick with the children to persuade each other to touch with the tongue a piece of metal which has been exposed to the open air; adhesion takes place immediately: even the metal knobs on the doors of the room I carefully avoid touching--the contact is worse than unpleasant. Let but the spring come again, and I will take to myself wings and fly off to the west!--But will spring _ever_ come? When I look out upon the bleak, shrouded, changeless scene, there is something so awfully silent, fixed, and immutable in its aspect, that it is enough to disturb one's faith in the everlasting revolutions of the seasons. Green leaves and flowers, and streams that murmur as they flow, soft summer airs, to which we open the panting bosom--panting with too much life--shades grateful for their coolness,--can such things be, or do they exist only in poetry and Paradise? * * * * * GOETHE. "When I look back," said Goethe, "on my early and middle life, and now in my old age reflect how few of those remain who were young with me, life seems to me like a summer residence in a watering-place. When we first arrive, we form friendships with those who have already spent some time there, and must be gone the next week. The loss is painful, but we connect ourselves with the second generation of visitors, with whom we spend some time and become dearly intimate; but these also depart, and we are left alone with a third set, who arrive just as we are preparing for our departure, in whom we feel little or no interest." Goethe thought that a knowledge of the universe must be _innate_ with some poets. (It seems to have been so with Shakspeare.) He says he wrote "Götz von Berlichingen" when he was a young inexperienced man of two-and-twenty. "Ten years later," he adds, "I stood astonished at the truth of my own delineation; I had never beheld or experienced the like, therefore the knowledge of these multifarious aspects of human nature I must have possessed through a kind of anticipation."