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SNOW.

All through the long hours of the wintry day the low clouds hung close above our heads, to pour with more unswerving aim their constant storm of sleet and snow-sometimes working in soft silence, sometimes with impatient gusty breaths, but always busily at work. Darkness brought no rest to these laborious warriors of the air, but only fiercer strife; the wild winds rosenoisy recruits, they howled beneath the eaves, or swept around the walls, like hungry wolves, now here, now there, howling at opposite doors. Thus, through the anxious and wakeful night, the storm went on. The household lay vexed by broken dreams, with changing fancies of lost children on solitary moors, of stage coaches hopelessly overturned in drifted and pathless gorges, or of icy cordage upon disabled vessels in Arctic seas; until a softer warmth, as of sheltering snow-wreaths, lulled all into deeper rest till morning.

And what a morning! The sun, a young conqueror, sends in his glorious rays, like heralds, to rouse us for the inspection of his trophies. The baffled foe, retiring, has left far and near the high-heaped spoils behind. The glittering plains own the new victor. Over all the level and wide-swept meadows, over all the drifted, spotless slopes, he is proclaimed undisputed monarch. On the wooded hill-sides the startled shadows are in motion; they flee like young fawns, bounding upward and downward over rock and dell, as through the long, gleaming arches the king comes marching to his throne. But shade yet lingers undisturbed in the valleys, mingled with timid smoke from household chimneys; blue as the smoke, a gauzy haze is twined around the brow of every distant hill; and the same soft azure confuses the outlines of the nearer trees, to whose branches snowy wreaths are clinging, far up among the boughs, like strange new flowers. Everywhere the unstained surface glistens in the sunbeams. In the curves and wreaths of the drifts a blue tinge nestles. The fresh pure sky answers to it; every cloud has vanished, save one or two, which linger near the horizon, pardoned offenders, seeming far too innocent for mischief, although their dark and sullen brothers, banished ignominiously below the horizon's verge, may be plotting nameless treachery there. The brook still flows visibly through the valley, and the rocks that check its course are all rounded with fleecy surfaces, till they seem like tranquil sheep drinking the shallow flood.

The day is one of moderate cold, but clear and bracing; the air sparkles like the snow; everything seems dry and resonant, like the wood of a violin. All sounds are musical-the voices of children, the cooing of doves, the crowing of cocks, the chopping of wood, the

creaking of country vanes, the sweet jangle of team-bells. The snow has fallen under a cold temperature, and the flakes are perfectly crystallized; every shrub we pass bears wreaths which glitter as gorgeously as the nebula in the constellation Perseus; but in another hour of sunshine every one of those fragile outlines will disappear, and the white surface glitter no longer with stars, but with star-dust. On such a day, the universe seems to hold but three pure tints -blue, white, and green. The loveliness of the universe seems simplified to its last extreme of refined delicacy. That sensation we poor mortals often have, of being just on the edge of infinite beauty, yet with always a lingering film between, never presses down more closely than on days like this. Everything seems perfectly prepared to satiate the soul with inexpressible felicity if we could only, by one infinitesimal step farther, reach the mood to dwell in it.

Leaving behind us the snow-shovels of the street, we turn noiselessly toward the radiant margin of the sunlit woods. The loftier trees have already shaken the snow from their summits, but it still clothes the lower ones with a white covering that looks solid as marble. Yet see how lightly it escapes !-a slight gust shakes a single tree, there is a Staub-bach for a moment, and the branches stand free as in summer, a pyramid of green amid the whiteness of the yet imprisoned wood. Each branch raises itself when emancipated, thus changing the whole outline of the growth; and the snow beneath is punctured with a thousand little depressions, where the petty avalanches have just buried themselves and disappeared.

Looking back upon our track, it proves to be like all other human paths-straight in intention, but slightly devious in deed. We have gay companions on our way, for a breeze overtakes us, and a hundred little simooms of drift whirl along beside us, and whelm in miniature burial whole caravans of dry leaves. Here, too, our track intersects with that of some previous passer; he has but just gone on, judging by the freshness of the trail, and we can study his character and purposes. The large boots betoken a woodman or iceman; yet such a one would hardly have stepped so irresolutely where a little film of water has spread between the ice and snow and given a look of insecurity; and here again he has stopped to observe the wreaths on this pendent bough, and this snow-filled bird's-nest. And there the footsteps of the lover of beauty turn abruptly to the road again, and he vanishes from us for ever.

As we wander on through the wood, all the labyrinths of summer are buried beneath one white inviting pathway, and the pledge of perfect loneliness is given by the unbroken surface of the all-revealing snow. There appears

nothing living except a downy woodpecker, preacher has said that "the frost is God's whirling round and round upon a young beech-plough, which He drives through every inch of stem, and a few sparrows, plump with grass-ground in the world, opening each clod, and seed, and hurrying with jerking flight down the pulverising the whole." sunny glade. But the trees furnish society Coming out upon a hill-side, more exposed enough. What a congress of ermined kings is to the direct fury of the sleet, we find Nature this circle of hawthorns, which stand, white in wearing a wilder look. Every white-birch their soft raiment, around the daïs of this wood- clump around us is bent divergingly to the land pond! Are they held here, like the sove-ground, each white form prostrated in mute reigns in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, till despair upon the whiter bank. The bare, ome mortal breaks their spell? What sage writhing branches of yonder sombre oak-grove counsels must be theirs, as they nod their are steeped in snow, and in the misty air they weary heads, and whisper ghostly memories look so remote and foreign that there is not a and old men's tales to each other, while the red wild creature of the Norse mythology who leaves dance on the snowy sward below, or a might not stalk from beneath their haunted fox or squirrel steals hurriedly through the branches. Buried races, Teuton and Cimbri, wild and wintry night! Here and there is some might tramp solemnly forth from those weird discrowned Lear, who has thrown off his regal arcades. The soft pines on this nearer knoll mantle, and stands in faded russet, misplaced seem separated from them by ages and geneamong the monarchs. rations. On the farther hills spread woods of smaller growth, like forests of spun glass, jewellery by the acre provided for this coronation of winter. We descend a steep bank, little pellets of snow rolling hastily beside us, and leaving enamelled furrows behind. Entering the sheltered and sunny glade, we are assailed by a sudden warmth whose languor is almost oppressive. Wherever the sun strikes upon the pines, there is a household gleam which gives a more vivid sensation than the diffused brilliancy of summer. The sunbeams maintain a thousand secondary fires in the reflection of light from every tree and stalk, for the preservation of animal life and the ultimate melting of these accumulated drifts. Around each trunk or stone the snow has melted and fallen back. It is a singular fact, established beyond doubt by science, that the snow is absolutely less influenced by the direct rays of the sun than by these reflections. "If a blackened The larger larches have a different plaything: card is placed upon the snow or ice, in the sunon the bare branches, thickly studded with buds, shine, the frozen mass underneath it will be cling airily the small light cones of last year's gradually thawed, while that by which it is growth, each crowned with a little ball of soft surrounded, though exposed to the full power snow, four times taller than itself--save where of solar heat, is but little disturbed. If, howsome have drooped sideways-so that each car- ever, we reflect the sun's rays from a metal surries, poor weary Atlas, a sphere upon its back. face, an exactly contrary result takes place the Thus the coy creatures play cup and ball, and uncovered parts are the first to melt, and the one has lost its plaything yonder, as the branch blackened card stands high above the surroundslightly stirs, and the whole vanishes in a whirl ing portion." Look round upon the low-lying of snow. Meanwhile a fragment of low arbor-meadows, and you will see emerging through vitæ hedge, poor out-post of a neighbouring plantation, is so covered and packed with solid drift, inside and out, that it seems as if no power of sunshine could ever steal in among its twigs and disentangle it.

The shadows thrown by the trees upon the snow are blue and soft, sharply defined, and so contrasted with the gleaming white as to appear narrower than the boughs which cast them. There is something subtle and fantastic about these shadows. Here is a leafless larch-sapling, eight feet high. The image of the lower boughs is traced upon the snow, distinct and firm as cordage, while the higher ones grow dimmer by fine gradations, until the slender topmost twig is blurred and almost effaced. But the denser upper spire of the young spruce by its side throws almost as distinct a shadow as its base, and the whole figure looks of a more solid texture, as if you could feel it with your hand. More beautiful than either is the fine image of this baby birch: each delicate spray droops above as delicate a copy, and here and there the shadow and the substance kiss and frolic with each other in the downy snow.

In winter each separate object interests us; in summer, the mass. Natural beauty in winter is a poor man's luxury, infinitely enhanced in quality by the diminution in quantity. Winter, with fewer and simpler methods, yet seems to give all her works a finish even more delicate than that of summer, working, as Emerson says of our English agriculture, with a pencil instead of a plough. Or rather, the ploughshare is but concealed; since a pithy old

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the white surface a thousand stalks of grass, sedge, the common butter-bur, autumnal hawkbit, plantain, and meadow-saxifrage—an allied army, keeping up a perpetual volley of innumerable rays upon the yielding snow.

It is their last dying service. We misplace our tenderness in winter, and look with pity upon the leafless trees. But there is no tragedy in the trees: each is not dead, but sleepeth; and each bears a future summer of buds safe nestled on its bosom, as a mother reposes with her baby at her breast. The same security of life pervades every woody shrub: the alder and the birch have their catkins all ready for the first day of spring.

still ruddy breast. The weird and impenetrable crows, most talkative of birds and most uncommunicative, their very food at this season a mystery, are almost as numerous now as in summer. They always seem like some race of banished goblins, doing penance for some primeval and inscrutable transgression; and if any bird have a history, it is they. In the Spanish version of the tradition of King Arthur it is said that he fled from the weeping queens and the island valley of Avilion in the form of a crow; and hence it is said in "Don Quixote " that no Englishman will ever kill one.

Winter is no such solid bar between season and feet keeps its stores of life chiefly below its level Beason as we fancy, but only a slight check and platform, yet the scattered tracks of the waterinterruption: one may at any time produce rat beside the banks, of meadow mice around these March blossoms by bringing the buds in- the haystacks, of squirrels under the trees, of to the warm house; and the petals of the may-rabbits and partridges in the wood, show the flower sometimes show their pink and white warm life that is beating unseen, beneath fur or edges in autumn. But every grass blade and feathers, close beside us; the jays scream in the flower stalk is a mausoleum of vanished sum-wood, the robin contrasts with the snow his mer, itself crumbling to dust, never to rise again. Each child of June, scarce distinguishable in December against the background of moss and rocks and bushes, is brought into final prominence in January by the white snow which embeds it. The delicate flakes collapse and fall back around it, but they retain their inexorable hold. Thus delicate is the action of Nature-a finger of air, and a grasp of iron. We pass an old red foundry, banked in with snow, and its low eaves draped with icicles, and come to the brook which turns its resounding wheel. The musical motion of the water seems almost unnatural amidst the general stillness: brooks, like men, must keep themselves warm by exercise. The overhanging rushes and alder-sprays, weary of winter's sameness, have made for themselves playthings -each dangling a crystal knob of ice, which sways gently in the water and gleams ruddy in the sunlight. As we approach the foaming cascade, the toys become larger and more glittering, movable stalactites, which the water tosses merrily upon their flexible stems. The torrent pours down beneath an enamelled mask of ice, wreathed and convoluted like a brain, and sparkling with gorgeous glow. Tremulous motions and glimmerings go through the translucent veil, as if it throbbed with the throbbing wave beneath. It holds in its mazes stray bits of colour-scarlet berries, evergreen sprigs, and sprays of yellow willow; glittering necklaces and wreaths and tiaras of brilliant ice-work cling and trail around its edges, and no regal palace shines with such carcanets of jewels as this winter ball-room of the dancing drops.

Above, the brook becomes a smooth black canal, between two steep white banks; and the glassy water seems momentarily stiffening into the solider blackness of ice. Here and there thin films are already formed over it, and are being constantly broken apart by the treacherous current; a flake a foot square is jerked away and goes sliding beneath the slight transparent surface till it reappears below. The same thing, on a larger scale, helps to form the mighty icepack of the northern seas. Nothing except ice is capable of combining, on the largest scale, bulk with mobility, and this imparts a dignity to its motions even on the smallest scale. I do not believe that anything in Behring's Straits could impress me with a grander sense of desolation or of power than when in boyhood I watched the ice break up in the winding channel of the Severn.

Amidst so much that seems like death, let us turn and study the life. There is much more to be seen in winter than most of us have ever noticed. Though the pond beneath our

The traces of the insects in the winter are prophetic--from the delicate cocoon of some infinitesimal feathery thing which hangs upon the dry calyx of a weed, to the brown-paper parcel which hides in peasant garb the beauty of some painted moth. But the hints of birds are retrospective. In each tree of this pasture, the very pasture where last spring we looked for nests, and found them not among the deceitful foliage, the fragile domiciles now stand revealed. But where are the birds that filled them? Could the airy creatures nurtured in those nests have left permanently traced upon the air behind them their own bright summer flight, the whole atmosphere would be filled with interlacing lines and curves of gorgeous colouring, the centre of all being this forsaken bird's-nest filled with snow.

Among the many birds which winter here, and the many insects which are called forth by a few days' thaw, not a few must die of cold, or of fatigue amid the storms, Yet how few traces one sees of this mortality! Provision is made for it. Yonder a dead wasp has fallen on the snow, and the warmth of its body, or its power of reflecting a few small rays of light, is melting its little grave beneath it. With what a cleanly purity does Nature strive to withdraw all unsightly objects into her cemetery! Their own weight and lingering warmth take them through air or water, snow or ice, to the level of the earth; and there with spring comes an army of burying-insects, Necrophagi, in a livery of bronze and black, to dig a grave beneath every one, and not a sparrow faileth to the ground without knowledge. The tiny remains thus disappear from the surface, and the dry leaves are soon spread above these Children in the Wood.

Thus varied and benignant are the aspects of winter on sunny days. But it is impossible to claim this weather as the only type of our winter climate. There occasionally come days which, though perfectly still and serene, suggest more terror than any tempest-terrible, clear, glaring days of pitiless cold-when the sun seems power

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In neither case was there extreme suffering from cold, and it is unquestionable that the interior of a drift is far warmer than the surface. On the 23rd of December, 1860, at 9 p.m., I was surprised to observe drops falling from the under side of a heavy bank of snow at the eaves, at a distance from any chimney, while the mercury on the same side was only fifteen degrees above zero, not having indeed risen above the point of freezing during the whole day.

less, or only a brighter moon, when the windows remain ground-glass at high noontide, and when, on going out of doors, one is dazzled by the brightness, and fancies for a moment that it cannot be so cold as has been reported, but presently discovers that the severity is only more deadly for being so still. Exercise on such days seems to produce no warmth; one's limbs appear ready to break on any sudden motion, like icy boughs. Stage-drivers and draymen are transformed to mere human bundles of capes and coats; the patient oxen are Dr. Kane pays ample tribute to these kindly frost-covered; the horse that goes trotting by properties:-" Few of us at home can recognise waves a wreath of steam from his head. On the protecting value of this warm coverlet of such days life becomes a battle to all house- snow. No eider-down in the cradle of an holders, the ordinary apparatus for defence is infant is tucked in more kindly than the sleepinsufficient, and the price of caloric is continual ing dress of winter about this feeble flower-life. vigilance. In innumerable armies the frost The first warm snows of August and September, besieges the portal, creeps in beneath it and falling on a thickly pleached carpet of grasses, above it, and on every latch and key-handle heaths, and willows, enshrine the flowery lodges an advanced guard of white rime. Leave growths which nestle round them in a nonthe door ajar never so slightly, and a chill conducting air-chamber; and as each successive creeps in cat-like; we are conscious by the snow increases the thickness of the cover, we warmest fireside of the near vicinity of cold-have, before the intense cold of winter sets in, a its fingers are feeling after us, and even if they light cellular bed covered by drift, six, eight, or do not clutch us, we know that they are there. ten feet deep, in which the plant retains its The sensations of such days almost make us vitality. I have found in midwinter, in associate their clearness and whiteness with this high latitude of 78° 50', the surface so something malignant and evil. Charles Lamb nearly moist as to be friable to the touch; asserts of snow, "It glares too much for an and upon the ice-floes, commencing with innocent colour, methinks." Why does popu- a surface temperature of -30°, I found at lar mythology associate the infernal regions two feet deep a temperature of -8°, at with a high temperature instead of a low one? four feet +2°, and at eight feet + 26°. . El Aishi, the Arab writer, says of the bleak wind. . The glacier which we became so familiar of the desert (so writes Richardson, the African traveller): "The north wind blows with an intensity equalling the cold of hell; language fails me to describe its rigorous temperature." Some have thought that there is a similar allusion in the phrase, "weeping and gnashing of teeth" the teeth chattering from frost. Milton also enumerates cold as one of the torments of the lost :

"O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp;"

and one may sup full of horrors on the exceedingly cold collation provided for the next world by the Norse Edda.

Snow, indeed, actually nourishes animal life. It holds in its bosom numerous animalcules: you may have a glass of water, perfectly free from infusoria, which yet, after your dissolving in it a handful of snow, will show itself full of microscopic creatures, shrimp-like and swift; and the famous red snow of the Arctic regions is only an exhibition of the same property. It has sometimes been fancied that persons buried under the snow have received sustenance through the pores of the skin, like reptiles embedded in rock. Elizabeth Woodcock lived eight days beneath a snow-drift, in 1799, without eating a morsel; and Swiss family were buried beneath an avalanche in a manger, for five months, in 1755, with no food but a trifling store of chestnuts and a sinall daily supply of milk from a goat which was buried with them,

with afterwards at Etah yields an uninterrupted stream throughout the year." And he afterwards shows that even the varying texture and quality of the snow deposited during the earl' er and later portions of the Arctic winter have their special adaptations to the welfare of the vegetation they protect.

The process of crystallization seems a microcosm of the universe. Radiata, mollusca, feathers, flowers, ferns, mosses, palms, pines, grain-fields, leaves of cedar, chestnut, elm, acanthus-these and multitudes of other objects are figured on your frosty window; on sixteen different panes I have counted sixteen patterns strikingly distinct, and it appeared like a showcase for the globe. What can seem remoter relatives than the star, the star-fish, the starflower, and the starry snow-flake which clings perchance to your sleeve? yet some philosophers hold that one day their law of existence will be found precisely the same. The connection with the primeval star, especially, seems far and tanciful enough; but there are yet unexplored affinities between light and crystallization: some crystals have a tendency to grow toward the light, and others develop electricity and give out flashes of light during their formation. Slight foundations for scientific fancies, indeed; but slight is all our knowledge.

More than a hundred different figures of snow-flakes, all regular and kaleidoscopic, have been drawn by Scoresby, Lowe, and Glaisher, and may be found pictured in the encyclopædias

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