If we had not our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still
have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates
for all its bullying vagaries--the ice-storm--when a leafless
tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top--ice that is
as bright and clear as crystal; every bough and twig is strung
with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles
cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s diamond plume. Then
the wind waves the branches, and the sun comes out and turns
all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms, that glow and
hum and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change
and change again, with inconceivable rapidity, from blue to
red, from red to green, and green to gold; the tree becomes a
sparkling fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it
stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility
in art or nature of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable
magnificence!--SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.
(1476)
=Icebergs=--See GRAVITATION AND ICEBERGS.