Our opening remark was not strictly original, but we did not mind. It was true, if it wasn’t new; and without being told, I think we had discovered--by intuition, I suppose--what older heads seem to have learned by rule, that it is good rhetoric, so to speak, to begin with a quotation. I was pleased, the other day, to see a brilliant essayist commending it as an excellent and becoming practice to leapfrog into one’s subject over the back of some famous predecessor. Such was our custom, for better or worse, till a certain master (I am tempted to name him, but forbear) announced just before the fatal day, that compositions on “The Seasons” would no longer be accepted. That was cruelty to authors. He spoke with a smile, but it was a smile of malice. I have never forgiven him. He is living still, a preacher of the gospel. When Saturday night comes, and he finds himself hard put to it for the morrow’s sermon (as I have no doubt he often does--I hope so, at all events), does he never remember the day when with the word of his mouth he deprived thirty or forty young innocents of their easiest and best appreciated text? He is righteously punished. Let him preach to himself, some Sunday, from Numbers xxxii. 23, “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Why shouldn’t one write about the seasons, I wonder. There is scarcely anything more important, or more universally interesting, than the weather. Ten to one it was the first thing we all thought of this morning. And the seasons are nothing but weather in large packages--weather at wholesale. Their changes are our epochs, our date-points. But for them, all days being alike, there would be no calendar. It is well known that people who live in the tropics seldom know their own age. How should they, with nothing to distinguish one time of year from another? Young or old, they have never learned that “there are four seasons in the year.” We are better off. Life with us is not all in the present tense. As Hamlet said, we look before and after. (Hence it is, I suppose, that we have “such large discourse,” and continue, some of us, to write compositions.) We live by expectation. “Behold,” says the weather, “I make all things new.” Every day is another one, and every season also. At this very minute a miraculous change is at hand. A great and effectual door is about to swing on its hinges, and I, for one, wish to be awake to see it; not to wake up by and by and find the door wide open. So far from wearying of the seasons as an old story, I am more intensely interested in them than ever. If any of my fellow citizens are not just now thinking daily of the passing of winter and the advent of spring, I should like to know what they are made of. For myself, I am like a man in jail. My term is about to expire, and I am notching off the days one by one on a stick. “Three more,” say I; “two more.” “Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.” And I am ready to hang my cap on the horns of the moon.