Is our Venus to be the frail, insnaring Aphrodite, or the starry, divine Urania? OUR WOOD LOT IN WINTER. Our wood lot! Yes, we have arrived at the dignity of owning a wood lot, and for us simple folk there is something invigorating in the thought. To OWN even a small spot of our dear old mother earth hath in it a relish of something stimulating to human nature. To own a meadow, with all its thousand-fold fringes of grasses, its broidery of monthly flowers, and its outriders of birds, and bees, and gold-winged insects--this is something that establishes one's heart. To own a clover patch or a buckwheat field is like possessing a self-moving manufactory for perfumes and sweetness; but a wood lot, rustling with dignified old trees--it makes a man rise in his own esteem; he might take off his hat to himself at the moment of acquisition. We do not marvel that the land-acquiring passion becomes a mania among our farmers, and particularly we do not wonder at a passion for wood land. That wide, deep chasm of conscious self-poverty and emptiness which lies at the bottom of every human heart, making men crave property as something to add to one's own bareness, and to ballast one's own specific levity, is sooner filled by land than any thing else. Your hoary New England farmer walks over his acres with a grim satisfaction. He sets his foot down with a hard stamp; _here_ is reality. No moonshine bank stock! no swindling railroads! _Here_ is _his_ bank, and there is no defaulter here. All is true, solid, and satisfactory; he seems anchored to this life by it. So Pope, with fine tact, makes the old miser, making his will on his death bed, after parting with every thing, die, clinging to the possession of his _land_. He disposes with many a groan of this and that house, and this and that stock and security; but at last the _manor_ is proposed to him. "The manor! hold!" he cried, "Not that; _I cannot part with that!_"--and died! In such terms we discoursed yesterday, Herr Professor and myself, while jogging along in an old-fashioned chaise to inspect a few acres of wood lot, the acquisition of which had let us, with great freshness, into these reflections. Does any fair lady shiver at the idea of a drive to the woods on the first of February? Let me assure her that in the coldest season Nature never wants her ornaments full worth looking at.