Ipse genu poito flammas exsuscitat aura.
Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames.
If you walk down now into the woods, you may find a robin or a blue-bird
among the red-cedars, or a nuthatch scaling deviously the trunk of some
hardwood tree with an eye as keen as that of a French soldier foraging
for the _pot-au-feu_ of his mess. Perhaps a blue-jay shrills _cah cah_
in his corvine trebles, or a chickadee
“Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
Head downward, clinging to the spray.”
But both him and the snow-bird I love better to see, tiny fluffs of
feathered life, as they scurry about in a driving mist of snow, than in
this serene air.
Coleridge has put into verse one of the most beautiful phenomena of a
winter walk:--
“The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a halo round its head.”
But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. I have noticed it often in a
summer morning, when the grass was heavy with dew, and even later in the
day, when the dewless grass was still fresh enough to have a gleam of
its own.
For my own part I prefer a winter walk that takes in the nightfall and
the intense silence that erelong follows it. The evening lamps look
yellower by contrast with the snow, and give the windows that hearty
look of which our secretive fires have almost robbed them. The stars
seem
To hang, like twinkling winter lamps,
Among the branches of the leafless trees,
or, if you are on a hill-top (whence it is sweet to watch the
home-lights gleam out one by one), they look nearer than in summer, and
appear to take a conscious part in the cold. Especially in one of those
stand-stills of the air that forebode a change of weather, the sky is
dusted with motes of fire of which the summer-watcher never dreamed.
Winter, too, is, on the whole, the triumphant season of the moon, a moon
devoid of sentiment, if you choose, but with the refreshment of a purer
intellectual light,--the cooler orb of middle life. Who ever saw
anything to match that gleam, rather divined than seen, which runs
before her over the snow, a breath of light, as she rises on the
infinite silence of winter night? High in the heavens, also she seems to
bring out some intenser property of cold with her chilly polish. The
poets have instinctively noted this. When Goody Blake imprecates a curse
of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, she has
“The cold, cold moon above her head”;
and Coleridge speaks of
“The silent icicles,
Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon.”
As you walk homeward,--for it is time that we should end our
ramble,--you may perchance hear the most impressive sound in nature,
unless it be the fall of a tree in the forest during the hush of summer
noon. It is the stifled shriek of the lake yonder as the frost throttles
it. Wordsworth has described it (too much, I fear, in the style of Dr.
Armstrong):--
“And, interrupting oft that eager game,
From under Esthwaite’s splitting fields of ice,
The pent-up air, struggling to free itself,
Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills a loud
Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves
Howling in troops along the Bothnic main.”
Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a different dialect from ours)
calls it admirably well a “whoop.” But it is a noise like none other, as
if Demogorgon were moaning inarticulately from under the earth. Let us
get within doors, lest we hear it again, for there is something bodeful
and uncanny in it.