hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns,
cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes; nothing
came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the children knew the
taste of everything they saw or touched, from pennyroyal and
flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a
spelling-book -- the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on the
boy's tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and color as
sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest. The
New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens color.
The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was meant by
atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze of a New
England sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early
morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it
a mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June
afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples of colored
prints and children's picture-books, as the American colors then
ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies, were the
cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of
Boston winter. With such standards, the Bostonian could not but
develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. After a January
blizzard, the boy who could look with pleasure into the violent
snow-glare of the cold white sunshine, with its intense light and
shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone. He could reach it
only by education.

Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two
separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer
was tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass,
or waded in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in
the bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in