That is a striking line with which Emerson opens his beautiful poem of
the Snow-Storm:--
"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight."
One seems to see the clouds puffing their cheeks as they sound the
charge of their white legions. But the line is more accurately
descriptive of a rain-storm, as, in both summer and winter, rain is
usually preceded by wind. Homer, describing a snow-storm in his time,
says:--
"The winds are lulled."
[Illustration: TRACKS IN THE SNOW]
The preparations of a snow-storm are, as a rule, gentle and quiet; a
marked hush pervades both the earth and the sky. The movements of the
celestial forces are muffled, as if the snow already paved the way of
their coming. There is no uproar, no clashing of arms, no blowing of
wind trumpets. These soft, feathery, exquisite crystals are formed as
if in the silence and privacy of the inner cloud-chambers. Rude winds
would break the spell and mar the process. The clouds are smoother,
and slower in their movements, with less definite outlines than those
which bring rain. In fact, everything is prophetic of the gentle and
noiseless meteor that is approaching, and of the stillness that is to
succeed it, when "all the batteries of sound are spiked," as Lowell
says, and "we see the movements of life as a deaf man sees it,--a mere
wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our ears
when the ground is bare." After the storm is fairly launched the winds
not infrequently awake, and, seeing their opportunity, pipe the flakes
a lively dance. I am speaking now of the typical, full-born midwinter
storm that comes to us from the North or N. N. E., and that piles the
landscape knee-deep with snow. Such a storm once came to us the last
day of January,--the master-storm of the winter. Previous to that
date, we had had but light snow. The spruces had been able to catch
it all upon their arms, and keep a circle of bare ground beneath
them where the birds scratched. But the day following this fall, they
stood with their lower branches completely buried. If the Old Man of
the North had but sent us his couriers and errand-boys before, the old
graybeard appeared himself at our doors on this occasion, and we were
all his subjects. His flag was upon every tree and roof, his seal upon
every door and window, and his embargo upon every path and highway. He
slipped down upon us, too, under the cover of such a bright, seraphic
day,--a day that disarmed suspicion with all but the wise ones, a day
without a cloud or a film, a gentle breeze from the west, a dry,
bracing air, a blazing sun that brought out the bare ground under the
lee of the fences and farm-buildings, and at night a spotless moon
near her full. The next morning the sky reddened in the east, then
became gray, heavy, and silent. A seamless cloud covered it. The smoke
from the chimneys went up with a barely perceptible slant toward the
north. In the forenoon the cedar-birds, purple finches, yellowbirds,
nuthatches, bluebirds, were in flocks or in couples and trios about
the trees, more or less noisy and loquacious. About noon a thin white
veil began to blur the distant southern mountains. It was like a white
dream slowly descending upon them. The first flake or flakelet that
reached me was a mere white speck that came idly circling and eddying
to the ground. I could not see it after it alighted. It might have
been a scale from the feather of some passing bird, or a larger mote
in the air that the stillness was allowing to settle. Yet it was the
altogether inaudible and infinitesimal trumpeter that announced the
coming storm, the grain of sand that heralded the desert. Presently
another fell, then another; the white mist was creeping up the river
valley. How slowly and loiteringly it came, and how microscopic its
first siftings!
This mill is bolting its flour very fine, you think. But wait a
little; it gets coarser by and by; you begin to see the flakes; they
increase in numbers and in size, and before one o'clock it is snowing
steadily. The flakes come straight down, but in a half hour they have
a marked slant toward the north; the wind is taking a hand in the
game. By mid-afternoon the storm is coming in regular pulse-beats or
in vertical waves. The wind is not strong, but seems steady; the
pines hum, yet there is a sort of rhythmic throb in the meteor; the
air toward the wind looks ribbed with steady-moving vertical waves of
snow. The impulses travel along like undulations in a vast suspended
white curtain, imparted by some invisible hand there in the northeast.
As the day declines the storm waxes, the wind increases, the snow-fall
thickens, and
"the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, inclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm,"
a privacy which you feel outside as well as in. Out-of-doors you seem
in a vast tent of snow; the distance is shut out, near-by objects are
hidden; there are white curtains above you and white screens about
you, and you feel housed and secluded in storm. Your friend leaves
your door, and he is wrapped away in white obscurity, caught up in a
cloud, and his footsteps are obliterated. Travelers meet on the road,
and do not see or hear each other till they are face to face. The
passing train, half a mile away, gives forth a mere wraith of sound.
Its whistle is deadened as in a dense wood.
Still the storm rose. At five o'clock I went forth to face it in a
two-mile walk. It was exhilarating in the extreme. The snow was
lighter than chaff. It had been dried in the Arctic ovens to the last
degree. The foot sped through it without hindrance. I fancied the
grouse and the quail quietly sitting down in the open places, and
letting it drift over them. With head under wing, and wing snugly
folded, they would be softly and tenderly buried in a few moments. The
mice and the squirrels were in their dens, but I fancied the fox
asleep upon some rock or log, and allowing the flakes to cover him.
The hare in her form, too, was being warmly sepulchred with the rest.
I thought of the young cattle and the sheep huddled together on the
lee side of a haystack in some remote field, all enveloped in mantles
of white.
"I thought me on the ourie cattle,
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O' wintry war,
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing sprattle,
Beneath a scaur.
"Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing,
That in the merry months o' spring
Delighted me to hear thee sing,
What comes o' thee?
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing,
And close thy ee?"
As I passed the creek, I noticed the white woolly masses that filled
the water. It was as if somebody upstream had been washing his sheep
and the water had carried away all the wool, and I thought of the
Psalmist's phrase, "He giveth snow like wool." On the river a heavy
fall of snow simulates a thin layer of cotton batting. The tide drifts
it along, and, where it meets with an obstruction alongshore, it folds
up and becomes wrinkled or convoluted like a fabric, or like cotton
sheeting. Attempt to row a boat through it, and it seems indeed like
cotton or wool, every fibre of which resists your progress.
As the sun went down and darkness fell, the storm impulse reached its
full. It became a wild conflagration of wind and snow; the world was
wrapt in frost flame; it enveloped one, and penetrated his lungs and
caught away his breath like a blast from a burning city. How it
whipped around and under every cover and searched out every crack and
crevice, sifting under the shingles in the attic, darting its white
tongue under the kitchen door, puffing its breath down the chimney,
roaring through the woods, stalking like a sheeted ghost across the
hills, bending in white and ever-changing forms above the fences,
sweeping across the plains, whirling in eddies behind the buildings,
or leaping spitefully up their walls,--in short, taking the world
entirely to itself, and giving a loose rein to its desire.
[Illustration: THE STUDY]
But in the morning, behold! the world was not consumed; it was not the
besom of destruction, after all, but the gentle hand of mercy. How
deeply and warmly and spotlessly Earth's nakedness is clothed!--the
"wool" of the Psalmist nearly two feet deep. And as far as warmth and
protection are concerned, there is a good deal of the virtue of wool
in such a snow-fall. How it protects the grass, the plants, the roots
of the trees, and the worms, insects, and smaller animals in the
ground! It is a veritable fleece, beneath which the shivering earth
("the frozen hills ached with pain," says one of our young poets) is
restored to warmth. When the temperature of the air is at zero, the
thermometer, placed at the surface of the ground beneath a foot and a
half of snow, would probably indicate but a few degrees below
freezing; the snow is rendered such a perfect non-conductor of heat
mainly by reason of the quantity of air that is caught and retained
between the crystals. Then how, like a fleece of wool, it rounds and
fills out the landscape, and makes the leanest and most angular field
look smooth!
The day dawned, and continued as innocent and fair as the day which
had preceded,--two mountain peaks of sky and sun, with their valley of
cloud and snow between. Walk to the nearest spring run on such a
morning, and you can see the Colorado valley and the great cañons of
the West in miniature, carved in alabaster. In the midst of the plain
of snow lie these chasms; the vertical walls, the bold headlands, the
turrets and spires and obelisks, the rounded and towering capes, the
carved and buttressed precipices, the branch valleys and cañons, and
the winding and tortuous course of the main channel are all here,--all
that the Yosemite or Yellowstone have to show, except the terraces and
the cascades. Sometimes my cañon is bridged, and one's fancy runs
nimbly across a vast arch of Parian marble, and that makes up for the
falls and the terraces. Where the ground is marshy, I come upon a
pretty and vivid illustration of what I have read and been told of
the Florida formation. This white and brittle limestone is undermined
by water. Here are the dimples and depressions, the sinks and the
wells, the springs and the lakes. Some places a mouse might break
through the surface and reveal the water far beneath, or the snow
gives way of its own weight, and you have a minute Florida well, with
the truncated cone-shape and all. The arched and subterranean pools
and passages are there likewise.
But there is a more beautiful and fundamental geology than this in the
snow-storm: we are admitted into Nature's oldest laboratory, and see
the working of the law by which the foundations of the material
universe were laid,--the law or mystery of crystallization. The earth
is built upon crystals; the granite rock is only a denser and more
compact snow, or a kind of ice that was vapor once and may be vapor
again. "Every stone is nothing else but a congealed lump of frozen
earth," says Plutarch. By cold and pressure air can be liquefied,
perhaps solidified. A little more time, a little more heat, and the
hills are but April snow-banks. Nature has but two forms, the cell and
the crystal,--the crystal first, the cell last. All organic nature is
built up of the cell; all inorganic, of the crystal. Cell upon cell
rises the vegetable, rises the animal; crystal wedded to and compacted
with crystal stretches the earth beneath them. See in the falling snow
the old cooling and precipitation, and the shooting, radiating forms
that are the architects of planet and globe.
We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of
life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death; yet snow is but
the mask of the life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man,--the
tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow.