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Minstrel Weather
BY
MARIAN STORM
_With Illustrations and Decorations
By Clinton Balmer_
[Illustration]
Knowledge, we are not foes.
Long hast thou toiled with me;
But the world with a great wind blows,
Crying, and not of thee!
EURIPIDES
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
[Illustration]
MINSTREL WEATHER
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published November, 1920
K--U
_For_
AMY LOVEMAN
The Minstrel Made His Tune of Hours and Seasons
Dewfall, moonrise, high sweet clover,
Chimney swifts at their twilight play;
Quail call, owl hoot, moth a-hover,
Midnight pale at the step of day.
Star wane, cobweb, brown-plumed bracken;
Morning laughs, with the frost in flower;
Duck flight, hound cry; wild grapes blacken.
Day leaps up at the amber hour.
Sun dark, snowcloud, eaves ice cumbered,
Gray sand piled on a carmine West;
Faint wing, flake dance; winds unnumbered
Swing the cradles where leaf-buds rest.
Wide light, bough flush, gold-fringed meadows,
Berries red in the rippled grass;
Stream song, nest note, dream deep shadows
Drawn back slowly for noon to pass.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. Faces of Janus 1
II. A Woodland Valentine 7
III. Ways of the March Hare 13
IV. The April Moment 19
V. The Crest of Spring 25
VI. Hay Harvest Time 31
VII. The Month of Yellow Flowers 37
VIII. The Mood of August 43
IX. Summer Pauses 48
X. When the Oaks Wear Damson 54
XI. November Traits 60
XII. The Christmas Woods 66
XIII. Landscapes Seen in Dreams 72
XIV. Hiding Places 78
XV. The Play of Leaves 84
XVI. The Brown Frontier 90
XVII. Far Altars 96
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Milky Way Revealed to Lonely Herdsmen _Frontispiece_
The Comforting Symbolism of Firelight
at Play upon Clean Hearths _Facing p._ 4
The Powers of Light " 10
On the Topmost Boughs the Fairies Sleep " 26
The Rejoicing Shout of Coming Summer " 28
The Swooping Bat Darts Noiselessly " 34
Now the Mountaineer's Girl Hurries Indoors
at Nightfall from the Hallooing Specter
of the Wild Huntsman in the Clouds " 54
Baldwins Mellow by Twelfth-night " 58
December Acknowledges an Unpitying
Fate--Anything May Happen " 68
MINSTREL WEATHER
CHAPTER I.
FACES OF JANUS
[Illustration]
Though January has days that dress in saffron for their going, and noons
of yellow light, foretelling crocuses, the month is yet not altogether
friendly. The year is moving now toward its most unpitying season.
Nights that came on kindly may turn the meadows to iron, tear off the
last faithful leaves from oaks, drive thick clouds across the moon, to
end in a violent dawn. January holds gentle weather in one hand and
blizzards in the other, and what a blizzard can be only dwellers on
prairies or among the mountains know. Snow gone mad, its legions
rushing across the land with daggers drawn, furious, bearing no malice,
but certainly no compassion, and overwhelming all creatures abroad:
bewildered flocks, birds half frozen on their twigs, cattle unwisely
left on shelterless ranges, and people who lose the way long before
animals give up. Snow hardly seems made of fairy stars and flowers when
its full terror sweeps Northern valleys or the interminable solitudes of
the plains. The gale so armed for attack owns something of the wicked
intention which Conrad says that sailors often perceive in a storm at
sea. The rider pursued by a blizzard may feel, like the tossed mariner,
that "these elemental forces are coming at him with a purpose, with an
unbridled cruelty which means to sweep the whole precious world away by
the simple and appalling act of taking his life." We do not smile at the
pathetic fallacy when we are alone with cold. The overtaken mountaineer
understands--it means to get him. These things happen in places where
weather is not obedient to wraps and furnaces, but where it must be
fought hand to hand and where the pretty snow tangles its victim's feet
and slowly puts him to sleep in a delicious dream of warmth. Tropical
lightning has not the calm omnipotence of cold when it walks lonely
ways.
January knows days on which the haze of spring and the dim tenderness of
the sunshine tempt the rabbit to try another nap _al fresco_, indiscreet
though he knows it to be. Even the woodchuck must turn over and sniff in
his sleep as the thaw creeps downward; and the muskrat takes his safe
way by water once more, while the steel trap waits on the bank, to be
sprung humanely by a falling cone. The lithe red fox glides across the
upper pastures and weaves among the hardhack unchallenged, for this is
not hunting weather. A fleeting respite comes to the tormented mink.
Toward the last of the month, innocent of the February and March to
come, pussy willows, ingenuously deceived by the brief mildness, come
out inquisitively and stand in expectation beside the brook, convinced
that this ice is only left over--what can have delayed the garnet-veined
skunk's cabbage, always on hand the first of all? So many willows are
needed by the florists that perhaps they do not pay heavily for their
premature debut. But they are all gray now. In March they show a cloudy
crimson and yellow not alone of the final blossom, but of their fur.
There are plenty of scarlet rose hips in uplifted clusters, for the
birds somehow neglect them while they pursue other delicacies of the
same color and contour. Nature has probably told the winter chippies
that rose hips are no good--spring decorations must not be pilfered by
the snow sprites. Puffballs have broken off from old logs, and in
walking through low woods you may step on one here and there, awakening
the fancy that the world is burning, under its sad cloak of sepia
leaves, and sending up small puffs of smoke to warn those who have
trodden it in love and comprehension.
When the winsome skies turn stony, and melancholy winter rain ends in
chill mist, January has days to breathe whose air is like breathing
under water, down in spring-cold lake, where the incredible,
pleasureless fishes move through their gray element, finding pallid
amusement perhaps in nudging frogs and turtles, well tucked up under a
blanket of mud. They are cold-blooded, of course, and not supposed to
mind the oppressiveness of the liquid atmosphere. But after ourselves
moving in such an environment it is marvelous to ponder that any
creatures prefer it, and good to foreknow that our own world will swim
out into a splendid frosty weather.
[Illustration]
For its days of quiet sparkle we would remember January, not for lashing
tempests, April delusions, or brooding fog. Unbroken snow with blazing
spangles shifting as the sun moves, and above it twittering sparrows
clinging by one claw to stalks of yarrow or mustard while they shake the
seeds loose with the other; old stone walls suddenly demonstrating that
they have color, when the foreground is white, and showing bluish,
brown, earthen red, and gray alight with mica; streams covered with
pearly ice that floods into brilliant orange at sunset; spruce and
hemlock imperiously outlined on even far-off hills; skating-time without
and kindled logs within--that is the midwinter we remember when the
sterner messengers sped from the Pole have gone again. Were it not for
the blizzard we might fail to know so well the comforting symbolism of
firelight at play upon clean hearths. Many go all their lives, aware
only of the coziness or inconvenience of winter, never facing the
daggered gale alone, nor struck by the terror of a hostile Nature or the
awe of cold that may not soon relent. What one perceives in the volcano,
tidal wave, or blizzard, another is spared; the lesson, perhaps, being
postponed until he is ready for it. Spring comes sweetly to the
milliners' this month. To the wilderness with rapid and menacing step
comes full winter.