Nobody else in the world, I am bold to
affirm--nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New
England,--had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests
the tropic. Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most
skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve's bower
than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux. But we made a
summer of it, in spite of the wild drifts.

It was an April day, as already hinted, and well towards the middle of
the month. When morning dawned upon me, in town, its temperature was
mild enough to be pronounced even balmy, by a lodger, like myself, in
one of the midmost houses of a brick block,--each house partaking of
the warmth of all the rest, besides the sultriness of its individual
furnace--heat. But towards noon there had come snow, driven along the
street by a northeasterly blast, and whitening the roofs and sidewalks
with a business-like perseverance that would have done credit to our
severest January tempest. It set about its task apparently as much in
earnest as if it had been guaranteed from a thaw for months to come.
The greater, surely, was my heroism, when, puffing out a final whiff of
cigar-smoke, I quitted my cosey pair of bachelor-rooms,--with a good
fire burning in the grate, and a closet right at hand, where there was
still a bottle or two in the champagne basket and a residuum of claret
in a box,--quitted, I say, these comfortable quarters, and plunged into
the heart of the pitiless snowstorm, in quest of a better life.

The better life! Possibly, it would hardly look so now; it is enough
if it looked so then. The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the
doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the
truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to
know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to
follow out one's daydream to its natural consummation, although, if the
vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be
consummated otherwise than by a failure. And what of that? Its
airiest fragments, impalpable as they may be, will possess a value that
lurks not in the most ponderous realities of any practicable scheme.
They are not the rubbish of the mind. Whatever else I may repent of,
therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I
once had faith and force enough to