MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

FIRE WORSHIP



It is a great revolution in social and domestic life, and no less so
in the life of a secluded student, this almost universal exchange of
the open fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove. On such a
morning as now lowers around our old gray parsonage, I miss the
bright face of my ancient friend, who was wont to dance upon the
hearth and play the part of more familiar sunshine. It is sad to
turn from the cloudy sky and sombre landscape; from yonder hill,
with its crown of rusty, black pines, the foliage of which is so
dismal in the absence of the sun; that bleak pasture-land, and the
broken surface of the potato-field, with the brown clods partly
concealed by the snowfall of last night; the swollen and sluggish
river, with ice-incrusted borders, dragging its bluish-gray stream
along the verge of our orchard like a snake half torpid with the
cold,--it is sad to turn from an outward scene of so little comfort
and find the same sullen influences brooding within the precincts of
my study. Where is that brilliant guest, that quick and subtle
spirit, whom Prometheus lured from heaven to civilize mankind and
cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate,
whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient
consolation for summer's lingering advance and early flight? Alas!
blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery and
mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to