Gabriella had brought with her into this neighborhood of good-natured,
non-reading people the recollections of literature. These became her
library of the mind; and deep joy she drew from its invisible volumes.
She had transported a fine collection of the heroes and heroines of
good fiction (Gabriella, according to the usage of her class and time,
had never read any but standard works). These, when the earlier years
of adversity came on, had been her second refuge from the world:
religion was the first. Now they were the means by which she returned
to the world in imagination. The failure to gather together so durable
a company of friends leaves every mind the more destitute--especially a
woman's, which has greater need to live upon ideals, and cannot always
find these in actual life. Then there were short poems and parts of
long poems, which were as texts out of a high and beautiful Gospel of
Nature. One of these was on the snowstorm; and this same morning her
memory long was busy, fitting the poem within her mind to the scenery
around the farmhouse, as she passed joyously from window to window,
looking out far and near.
There it all was as the great New England poet had described it: that
masonry out of an unseen quarry, that frolic architecture of the snow,
nightwork of the North Wind, fierce artificer. In a few hours he had
mimicked with wild and savage fancy the structures which human art can
scarce rear, stone by stone, in an age: white bastions curved with
projected roof round every windward stake or tree or door; the gateway
overtopped with tapering turrets; coop and kennel hung mockingly with
Parian wreaths; a swanlike form investing the hidden thorn.
From one upper window under the blue sky in the distance she could see
what the poet had never beheld: a field of hemp shocks looking like a
winter camp, dazzlingly white. The scene brought to her mind some
verses written by a minor Kentucky writer on his own soil and people.