Few people know how to make a wood-fire, but everybody thinks he or she does.You want, first, a large backlog, which does not rest on the andirons.This will keep your fire forward, radiate heat all day, and late in the evening fall into a ruin of glowing coals, like the last days of a good man, whose life is the richest and most beneficent at the close, when the flames of passion and the sap of youth are burned out, and there only remain the solid, bright elements of character.Then you want a forestick on the andirons;and upon these build the fire of lighter stuff.In this way you have at once a cheerful blaze, and the fire gradually eats into the solid mass, sinking down with increasing fervor; coals drop below, and delicate tongues of flame sport along the beautiful grain of the forestick.There are people who kindle a fire underneath.But these are conceited people, who are wedded to their own way.I suppose an accomplished incendiary always starts a fire in the attic, if he can.
I am not an incendiary, but I hate bigotry.I don't call those incendiaries very good Christians who, when they set fire to the martyrs, touched off the fagots at the bottom, so as to make them go slow.Besides, knowledge works down easier than it does up.
Education must proceed from the more enlightened down to the more ignorant strata.If you want better common schools, raise the standard of the colleges, and so on.Build your fire on top.Let your light shine.I have seen people build a fire under a balky horse; but he wouldn't go, he'd be a horse-martyr first.A fire kindled under one never did him any good.Of course you can make a fire on the hearth by kindling it underneath, but that does not make it right.I want my hearthfire to be an emblem of the best things.
II
It must be confessed that a wood-fire needs as much tending as a pair of twins.To say nothing of fiery projectiles sent into the room, even by the best wood, from the explosion of gases confined in its cells, the brands are continually dropping down, and coals are being scattered over the hearth.However much a careful housewife, who thinks more of neatness than enjoyment, may dislike this, it is one of the chief delights of a wood-fire.I would as soon have an Englishman without side-whiskers as a fire without a big backlog; and I would rather have no fire than one that required no tending,--one of dead wood that could not sing again the imprisoned songs of the forest, or give out in brilliant scintillations the sunshine it absorbed in its growth.Flame is an ethereal sprite, and the spice of danger in it gives zest to the care of the hearth-fire.Nothing is so beautiful as springing, changing flame,--it was the last freak of the Gothic architecture men to represent the fronts of elaborate edifices of stone as on fire, by the kindling flamboyant devices.Afireplace is, besides, a private laboratory, where one can witness the most brilliant chemical experiments, minor conflagrations only wanting the grandeur of cities on fire.It is a vulgar notion that a fire is only for heat.A chief value of it is, however, to look at.
It is a picture, framed between the jambs.You have nothing on your walls, by the best masters (the poor masters are not, however, represented), that is really so fascinating, so spiritual.Speaking like an upholsterer, it furnishes the room.And it is never twice the same.In this respect it is like the landscape-view through a window, always seen in a new light, color, or condition.The fireplace is a window into the most charming world I ever had a glimpse of.
Yet direct heat is an agreeable sensation.I am not scientific enough to despise it, and have no taste for a winter residence on Mount Washington, where the thermometer cannot be kept comfortable even by boiling.They say that they say in Boston that there is a satisfaction in being well dressed which religion cannot give.There is certainly a satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hickory fire which is not to be found in the fieriest blasts of a furnace.The hot air of a furnace is a sirocco; the heat of a wood-fire is only intense sunshine, like that bottled in Lacrimae Christi.Besides this, the eye is delighted, the sense of smell is regaled by the fragrant decomposition, and the ear is pleased with the hissing, crackling, and singing,--a liberation of so many out-door noises.
Some people like the sound of bubbling in a boiling pot, or the fizzing of a frying-spider.But there is nothing gross in the animated crackling of sticks of wood blazing on the earth, not even if chestnuts are roasting in the ashes.All the senses are ministered to, and the imagination is left as free as the leaping tongues of flame.
The attention which a wood-fire demands is one of its best recommendations.We value little that which costs us no trouble to maintain.If we had to keep the sun kindled up and going by private corporate action, or act of Congress, and to be taxed for the support of customs officers of solar heat, we should prize it more than we do.Not that I should like to look upon the sun as a job, and have the proper regulation of its temperature get into politics, where we already have so much combustible stuff; but we take it quite too much as a matter of course, and, having it free, do not reckon it among the reasons for gratitude.Many people shut it out of their houses as if it were an enemy, watch its descent upon the carpet as if it were only a thief of color, and plant trees to shut it away from the mouldering house.All the animals know better than this, as well as the more simple races of men; the old women of the southern Italian coasts sit all day in the sun and ply the distaff, as grateful as the sociable hens on the south side of a New England barn; the slow tortoise likes to take the sun upon his sloping back, soaking in color that shall make him immortal when the imperishable part of him is cut up into shell ornaments.The capacity of a cat to absorb sunshine is only equaled by that of an Arab or an Ethiopian.They are not afraid of injuring their complexions.
