“Now is the time
To visit Nature in her grand attire”;
and he has one little picture which no other poet has surpassed:--
“High-ridged the whirlëd drift has almost reached
The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch:
Mute hangs the hooded bell; the tombs lie buried.”
Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his winter face as long and
as brightly as in central Italy, the seduction of the chimney-corner is
apt to predominate in the mind over the severer satisfactions of muffled
fields and penitential woods. The very title of Whittier’s delightful
“Snow-Bound” shows what _he_ was thinking of, though he does vapor a
little about digging out paths. The verses of Emerson, perfect as a
Greek fragment (despite the archaism of a dissyllabic fire), which he
has chosen for his epigraph, tell us, too, how the
“Housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.”
They are all in a tale. It is always the _tristis Hiems_ of Virgil.
Catch one of them having a kind word for old Barbe Fleurie, unless he
whines through some cranny, like a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment
while they toast their slippered toes. I grant there is a keen relish of
contrast about the bickering flame as it gives an emphasis beyond
Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or kindles the gloomy gold of
volumes scarce less friendly, especially when a tempest is blundering
round the house. Wordsworth has a fine touch that brings home to us the
comfortable contrast of without and within, during a storm at night, and
the passage is highly characteristic of a poet whose inspiration always
has an undertone of _bourgeois_:--
“How touching, when, at midnight, sweep
Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark,
To hear,--and sink again to sleep!”
J. H., one of those choice poets who will not tarnish their bright
fancies by publication, always insists on a snow-storm as essential to
the true atmosphere of whist. Mrs. Battles, in her famous rule for the
game, implies winter, and would doubtless have added tempest, if it
could be had for the asking. For a good solid read also, into the small
hours, there is nothing like that sense of safety against having your
evening laid waste, which Euroclydon brings, as he bellows down the
chimney, making your fire gasp, or rustles snow-flakes against the pane
with a sound more soothing than silence. Emerson, as he is apt to do,
not only hit the nail on the head, but drove it home, in that last
phrase of the “tumultuous privacy.”
But I would exchange this, and give something to boot, for the privilege
of walking out into the vast blur of a north-northeast snow-storm, and
getting a strong draught on the furnace within, by drawing the first
furrows through its sandy drifts. I love those
“Noontide twilights which snow makes
With tempest of the blinding flakes.”
If the wind veer too much toward the east, you get the heavy snow that
gives a true Alpine slope to the boughs of your evergreens, and traces a
skeleton of your elms in white; but you must have plenty of north in
your gale if you want those driving nettles of frost that sting the
cheeks to a crimson manlier than that of fire. During the great storm
of two winters ago, the most robustious periwig-pated fellow of late
years, I waded and floundered a couple of miles through the whispering
night, and brought home that feeling of expansion we have after being in
good company. “Great things doeth He which we cannot comprehend; for he
saith to the snow, ‘Be thou on the earth.’”
There is admirable snow scenery in Judd’s “Margaret,” but some one has
confiscated my copy of that admirable book, and, perhaps, Homer’s
picture of a snow-storm is the best yet in its large simplicity:--
“And as in winter-time, when Jove his cold sharp javelins throws
Amongst us mortals, and is moved to white the earth with snows,
The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest prominents,
Hill-tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown with most contents
The toils of men, seaports and shores, are hid, and every place,
But floods, that fair snow’s tender flakes, as their own brood, embrace.”
Chapman, after all, though he makes very free with him, comes nearer
Homer than anybody else. There is nothing in the original of that fair
snow’s tender flakes, but neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of their
heads the Psalmist’s tender phrase, “He giveth his snow like wool,” for
which also Homer affords no hint. Pope talks of “dissolving fleeces,”
and Cowper of a “fleecy mantle.” But David is nobly simple, while Pope
is simply nonsensical, and Cowper pretty. If they must have prettiness,
Martial would have supplied them with it in his
Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum,
which is too pretty, though I fear it would have pleased Dr. Donne.
Eustathius of Thessalonica calls snow ὓὂωρ ἒρίωὂες, woolly water, which
a poor old French poet, Godeau, has amplified into this:--
Lorsque la froidure inhumaine
De leur verd ornement depouille les forêts
Sous une neige épaisse il couvre les guérets,
Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la laine.
In this, as in Pope’s version of the passage in Homer, there is, at
least, a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in the blinding drift of
words. But, on the whole, if one would know what snow is, I should
advise him not to hunt up what the poets have said about it, but to look
at the sweet miracle itself.
The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as those of Spring. In a gray
December day, when, as the farmers say, it is too cold to snow, his
numbed fingers will let fall doubtfully a few star-shaped flakes, the
snow-drops and anemones that harbinger his more assured reign. Now, and
now only, may be seen, heaped on the horizon’s eastern edge, those “blue
clouds” from forth which Shakespeare says that Mars “doth pluck the
masoned turrets.” Sometimes also, when the sun is low, you will see a
single cloud trailing a flurry of snow along the southern hills in a
wavering fringe of purple. And when at last the real snow-storm comes,
it leaves the earth with a virginal look on it that no other of the
seasons can rival,--compared with which, indeed, they seem soiled and
vulgar.
And what is there in nature so beautiful as the next morning after such
confusion of the elements? Night has no silence like this of busy day.
All the batteries of noise are spiked. We see the movement 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. The earth is clothed in
innocence as a garment. Every wound of the landscape is healed; whatever
was stiff has been sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphrodite; what was
unsightly has been covered gently with a soft splendor, as if, Cowley
would have said, Nature had cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide
it. If the Virgin (_Nôtre Dame de la neige_) were to come back, here is
an earth that would not bruise her foot nor stain it. It is
“The fanned snow
That’s bolted by the northern blasts twice o’er,”--
Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi,
Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds,--
packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear your weight.
What grace is in all the curves, as if every one of them had been swept
by that inspired thumb of Phidias’s journeyman!
Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those light ripples
that sometimes scurry across smooth water with a sudden blur. But on
this gleaming hush the aerial deluge has left plain marks of its course;
and in gullies through which it rushed torrent-like, the eye finds its
bed irregularly scooped like that of a brook in hard beach-sand, or, in
more sheltered spots, traced with outlines like those left by the
sliding edges of the surf upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an
infinitely thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we shall have to
drink when the state does her whole duty as a moral reformer. Nor is the
wind the only thing whose trail you will notice on this sensitive
surface. You will find that you have more neighbors and night visitors
than you dreamed of. Here is the dainty footprint of a cat; here a dog
has looked in on you like an amateur watchman to see if all is right,
slumping clumsily about in the mealy treachery. And look! before you
were up in the morning, though you were a punctual courtier at the sun’s
levee, here has been a squirrel zigzagging to and fro like a hound
gathering the scent, and some tiny bird searching for unimaginable
food,--perhaps for the tinier creature, whatever it is, that drew this
slender continuous trail like those made on the wet beach by light
borderers of the sea. The earliest autographs were as frail as these.
Poseidon traced his lines, or giant birds made their mark, on preadamite
sea-margins; and the thunder-gust left the tear-stains of its sudden
passion there; nay, we have the signatures of delicatest fern-leaves on
the soft ooze of æons that dozed away their dreamless leisure before
consciousness came upon the earth with man. Some whim of nature locked
them fast in stone for us after-thoughts of creation. Which of us shall
leave a footprint as imperishable as that of the ornithorhyncus, or much
more so than that of these Bedouins of the snow-desert? Perhaps it was
only because the ripple and the rain-drop and the bird were not thinking
of themselves, that they had such luck. The chances of immortality
depend very much on that. How often have we not seen poor mortals, dupes
of a season’s notoriety, carving their names on seeming-solid rock of
merest beach-sand, whose feeble hold on memory shall be washed away by
the next wave of fickle opinion! Well, well, honest Jacques, there are
better things to be found in the snow than sermons.
The snow that falls damp comes commonly in larger flakes from windless
skies, and is the prettiest of all to watch from under cover. This is
the kind Homer had in mind; and Dante, who had never read him, compares
the _dilatate falde_, the flaring flakes, of his fiery rain, to those of
snow among the mountains without wind. This sort of snowfall has no
fight in it, and does not challenge you to a wrestle like that which
drives well from the northward, with all moisture thoroughly winnowed
out of it by the frosty wind. Burns, who was more out of doors than most
poets, and whose barefoot Muse got the color in her cheeks by vigorous
exercise in all weathers, was thinking of this drier deluge, when he
speaks of the “whirling drift,” and tells how
“Chanticleer
Shook off the powthery snaw.”
But the damper and more deliberate falls have a choice knack at draping
the trees; and about eaves or stonewalls, wherever, indeed, the
evaporation is rapid, and it finds a chance to cling, it will build
itself out in curves of wonderful beauty. I have seen one of these dumb
waves, thus caught in the act of breaking, curl four feet beyond the
edge of my roof and hang there for days, as if Nature were too well
pleased with her work to let it crumble from its exquisite pause. After
such a storm, if you are lucky enough to have even a sluggish ditch for
a neighbor, be sure to pay it a visit. You will find its banks corniced
with what seems precipitated light, and the dark current down below
gleams as if with an inward lustre. Dull of motion as it is, you never
saw water that seemed alive before. It has a brightness, like that of
the eyes of some smaller animals, which gives assurance of life, but of
a life foreign and unintelligible.
A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our freakish climate, the
wind will whisk sometimes into the northwest so suddenly as to plate all
the trees with crystal before it has swept the sky clear of its last
cobweb of cloud. Ambrose Philips, in a poetical epistle from Copenhagen
to the Earl of Dorset, describes this strange confectionery of
Nature,--for such, I am half ashamed to say, it always seems to me,
recalling the “glorified sugar-candy” of Lamb’s first night at the
theatre. It has an artificial air, altogether beneath the grand artist
of the atmosphere, and besides does too much mischief to the trees for a
philodendrist to take unmixed pleasure in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet
like Philips, who really loved Nature and yet liked her to be mighty
fine, as Pepys would say, with a heightening of powder and rouge:--
“And yet but lately have I seen e’en here
The winter in a lovely dress appear.
Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow,
Or winds begun through hazy skies to blow,
At evening a keen eastern breeze arose,
And the descending rain unsullied froze.
Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew,
The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view
The face of Nature in a rich disguise,
And brightened every object to my eyes;
For every shrub, and every blade of grass,
And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass;
In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show,
And through the ice the crimson berries glow;
The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield,
Seem polished lances in a hostile field;
The stag in limpid currents with surprise
Sees crystal branches on his forehead rise;
The spreading oak, the beech, the towering pine,
Glazed over in the freezing ether shine;
The frighted birds the rattling branches shun,
Which wave and glitter in the distant sun,
When, if a sudden gust of wind arise,
The brittle forest into atoms flies,
The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends
And in a spangled shower the prospect ends.”
It is not uninstructive to see how tolerable Ambrose is, so long as he
sticks manfully to what he really saw. The moment he undertakes to
improve on Nature he sinks into the mere court poet, and we surrender
him to the jealousy of Pope without a sigh. His “rattling branches” and
“crackling forest” are good, as truth always is after a fashion; but
what shall we say of that dreadful stag which, there is little doubt, he
valued above all the rest, because it was purely his own?
The damper snow tempts the amateur architect and sculptor. His
Pentelicus has been brought to his very door, and if there are boys to
be had (whose company beats all other recipes for prolonging life) a
middle-aged Master of the Works will knock the years off his account and
make the family Bible seem a dealer in foolish fables, by a few hours
given heartily to this business. First comes the Sisyphean toil of
rolling the clammy balls till they refuse to budge farther. Then, if
you would play the statuary, they are piled one upon the other to the
proper height; or if your aim be masonry, whether of house or fort, they
must be squared and beaten solid with the shovel. The material is
capable of very pretty effects, and your young companions meanwhile are
unconsciously learning lessons in æsthetics. From the feeling of
satisfaction with which one squats on the damp floor of his extemporized
dwelling, I have been led to think that the backwoodsman must get a
sweeter savor of self-reliance from the house his own hands have built
than Bramante or Sansovino could ever give. Perhaps the fort is the best
thing, for it calls out more masculine qualities and adds the cheer of
battle with that dumb artillery which gives pain enough to test pluck
without risk of serious hurt. Already, as I write, it is twenty-odd
years ago. The balls fly thick and fast. The uncle defends the
waist-high ramparts against a storm of nephews, his breast plastered
with decorations like another Radetsky’s. How well I recall the
indomitable good-humor under fire of him who fell in the front at Ball’s
Bluff, the silent pertinacity of the gentle scholar who got his last
hurt at Fair Oaks, the ardor in the charge of the gallant gentleman who,
with the death-wound in his side, headed his brigade at Cedar Creek! How
it all comes back, and they never come! I cannot again be the Vauban of
fortresses in the innocent snow, but I shall never see children moulding
their clumsy giants in it without longing to help. It was a pretty fancy
of the young Vermont sculptor to make his first essay in this evanescent
material. Was it a figure of Youth, I wonder? Would it not be well if
all artists could begin in stuff as perishable, to melt away when the
sun of prosperity began to shine, and leave nothing behind but the gain
of practised hands! It is pleasant to fancy that Shakespeare served his
apprenticeship at this trade, and owed to it that most pathetic of
despairing wishes,--
“O, that I were a mockery-king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water-drops!”
I have spoken of the exquisite curves of snow surfaces. Not less rare
are the tints of which they are capable,--the faint blue of the hollows,
for the shadows in snow are always blue, and the tender rose of higher
points, as you stand with your back to the setting sun and look upward
across the soft rondure of a hillside. I have seen within a mile of home
effects of color as lovely as any iridescence of the Silberhorn after
sundown. Charles II., who never said a foolish thing, gave the English
climate the highest praise when he said that it allowed you more hours
out of doors than any other, and I think our winter may fairly make the
same boast as compared with the rest of the year. Its still mornings,
with the thermometer near zero, put a premium on walking. There is more
sentiment in turf, perhaps, and it is more elastic to the foot; its
silence, too, is wellnigh as congenial with meditation as that of fallen
pine-tassel; but for exhilaration there is nothing like a stiff
snow-crust that creaks like a cricket at every step, and communicates
its own sparkle to the senses. The air you drink is _frappé_, all its
grosser particles precipitated, and the dregs of your blood with them. A
purer current mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, and
rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. There is nothing left to
breed an exhalation of ill-humor, or despondency. They say that this
rarefied atmosphere has lessened the capacity of our lungs. Be it so.
Quart-pots are for muddier liquor than nectar. To me, the city in winter
is infinitely dreary,--the sharp streetcorners have such a chill in
them, and the snow so soon loses its maidenhood to become a mere
drab,--“doing shameful things,” as Steele says of politicians, “without
being ashamed.” I pine for the Quaker purity of my country landscape. I
am speaking, of course, of those winters that are not niggardly of snow,
as ours too often are, giving us a gravelly dust instead. Nothing can be
unsightlier than those piebald fields where the coarse brown hide of
Earth shows through the holes of her ragged ermine. But even when there
is abundance of snow, I find as I grow older that there are not so many
good crusts as there used to be. When I first observed this, I rashly
set it to the account of that general degeneracy in nature (keeping pace
with the same melancholy phenomenon in man) which forces itself upon the
attention and into the philosophy of middle life. But happening once to
be weighed, it occurred to me that an arch which would bear fifty pounds
could hardly be blamed for giving way under more than three times the
weight. I have sometimes thought that if theologians would remember this
in their arguments, and consider that the man may slump through, with no
fault of his own, where the boy would have skimmed the surface in
safety, it would be better for all parties. However, when you _do_ get a
crust that will bear, and know any brooklet that runs down a hillside,
be sure to go and take a look at him, especially if your crust is due,
as it commonly is, to a cold snap following eagerly on a thaw. You will
never find him so cheerful. As he shrank away after the last thaw, he
built for himself the most exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if
not “measureless to man” like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet
perhaps more pleasing for their narrowness than those for their
grandeur. What a cunning silversmith is Frost! The rarest workmanship of
Delhi or Genoa copies him but clumsily, as if the fingers of all other
artists were thumbs. Fernwork and lacework and filagree in endless
variety, and under it all the water tinkles like a distant guitar, or
drums like a tambourine, or gurgles like the Tokay of an anchorite’s
dream. Beyond doubt there is a fairy procession marching along those
frail arcades and translucent corridors.
“Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill,
The hemlock small blow clear.”
And hark! is that the ringing of Titania’s bridle, or the bells of the
wee, wee hawk that sits on Oberon’s wrist! This wonder of Frost’s
handiwork may be had every winter, but he can do better than this,
though I have seen it but once in my life. There had been a thaw without
wind or rain, making the air fat with gray vapor. Towards sundown came
that chill, the avant-courier of a northwesterly gale. Then, though
there was no perceptible current in the atmosphere, the fog began to
attach itself in frosty roots and filaments to the southern side of
every twig and grass-stem. The very posts had poems traced upon them by
this dumb minstrel. Wherever the moist seeds found lodgement grew an
inch-deep moss fine as cobweb, a slender coral-reef, argentine,
delicate, as of some silent sea in the moon, such as Agassiz dredges
when he dreams. The frost, too, can wield a delicate graver, and in
fancy leaves Piranesi far behind. He covers your window-pane with Alpine
etchings, as if in memory of that sanctuary where he finds shelter even
in midsummer.
Now look down from your hillside across the valley. The trees are
leafless, but this is the season to study their anatomy, and did you
ever notice before how much color there is in the twigs of many of them?
And the smoke from those chimneys is so blue it seems like a feeder of
the sky into which it flows. Winter refines it and gives it agreeable
associations. In summer it suggests cookery or the drudgery of
steam-engines, but now your fancy (if it can forget for a moment the
dreary usurpation of stoves) traces it down to the fireside and the
brightened faces of children. Thoreau is the only poet who has fitly
sung it. The wood-cutter rises before day and
“First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad
His early scout, his emissary, smoke,
The earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof,
To feel the frosty air; ...
And, while he crouches, still beside the hearth,
Nor musters courage to unbar the door,
It has gone down the glen with the light wind
And o’er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath.
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,
And warmed the pinions of the early bird;
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,
Has caught sight of the day o’er the earth’s edge,
And greets its master’s eye at his low door
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky.”
Here is very bad verse and very good imagination. He had been reading
Wordsworth, or he would not have made _tree-tops_ an iambus. In the
_Moretum_ of Virgil (or, if not his, better than most of his) is a
pretty picture of a peasant kindling his winter-morning fire. He rises
before dawn,
Sollicitaque manu tenebras explorat inertes
Vestigatque focum læsus quem denique sensit.
Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite fumus,
Et cinis obductæ celabat lumina prunæ.
Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucernam,
Et producit acu stupas humore carentes,
Excitat et crebris languentem flatibus ignem;
Tandem concepto tenebræ fulgore recedunt,
Oppositaque manu lumen defendit ab aura.
With cautious hand he gropes the sluggish dark,
Tracking the hearth which, scorched, he feels erelong.
In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained,
And raked-up ashes hid the cinders’ eyes;
Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he nears.
And, with a needle loosening the dry wick,
With frequent breath excites the languid flame.
Before the gathering glow the shades recede,
And his bent hand the new-caught light defends.