Mini-Essay: The Wind in the Willows

tree study

I read the Wind in the Willows every Winter and it never gets old. I have been trying to write something in praise of the book, but all of my writing seems meager and shallow or like a bad copy after I read a passage from the Willows. So I'll just put a few quotes below and let the strength of Kenneth Grahame's writing convey what I am struggling to say. One of the joys of the book are the little side observations Kenneth Grahame makes here and there throughout the book.  Here are a few of my favorites:

     The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the inside of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off.  Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions.   Chapter 3 - The Wild Wood


     We others who have long lost the more subtle of the physical sense, have not even proper term to express an animal’s intercommunications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word “smell,” for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling.  Chapter 5 - Dulce Domum

       Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture - the natural grace which goes with  perfect unconsciousness of observation. Chapter 5 - Dulce Domum    

Happy Winter!

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