WOOD-SCENERY IN WINTER 



WINTER scenery has met with a remarkable share of 

 neglect both from authors and painters. Poets have sung 

 of winter festivals and holidays, of Christmas festivities, 

 of garlands of holly and trailing evergreens ; but they 

 have said little in prose or verse of the beauty or the 

 sublimity of the season's ordinary aspects. More effort 

 has been made to divert attention from winter, as entirely 

 disagreeable, except within doors, than to lure the mind 

 to its attractions. Its features have been described as 

 only waste and desolate, and what is really admirable in 

 them has been set aside as hardly worthy of thought. It 

 is true there is not much variety in the countenance of 

 winter. Its expressions are wild and rude, and partake 

 more of sublimity than beauty. It presents an insufficient 

 number of individual objects that can be brought to the 

 aid either of painting or poetry ; so that the composition 

 must be made up in great degree by auxiliaries drawn 

 from the imagination. 



Winter scenery is plainly monotonous. Instead of the 

 charming mosaic of agriculture, displayed by summer 

 and autumn in assemblages of fields, varying in color 

 with the native hue of their different crops, we see either 

 a dull universal waste of seared vegetation, or one broad 

 expanse of whiteness, relieved only by the dark slender 

 lines of fences and the broader stripes of roads and lanes 

 winding over the face of the snow, interspersed with 

 buildings and occasional woods and thickets. It is ap- 

 parent, however, that snow increases the variety of the 



