po A SPRING HERESY 



upon this upper glory of the dawn has seen the 

 ineffable. His own words mock him. The memory 

 of such scenes becomes part of conscience, a touch- 

 stone for after moods. 



But that was far away and long ago, and I must 

 needs picture for myself a sort of inverted sunset as 

 now heralding the advent of spring to those bright 

 upper spaces visible only to the mind's eye through 

 the closely drawn fog. 



Nevertheless, here below, during this week of 

 nights, some fine-fingered Ariel had been at his work. 

 Continuous frost had loaded the trees as only snow 

 might have done. But with how great a difference. 

 Those tricksy spirits of air that fashion the snow- 

 flakes, fling them down carelessly, as if making were 

 the end of making, not the fabric made ; and that 

 dull miser, gravitation, who claims each errant speck 

 of dust, must needs have these bright things of air 

 also to pile up undistinguishably on the earth, and to 

 shelve in shapeless masses on the winter leaves and 

 branches. The beauty of snow is in the flake : after 

 that there is no intermediate state; only at the other 

 extreme snow, in the mass, as seen in the whitened 

 landscape, exchanges beauty for grandeur, with 

 something of solemnity in the broad, hushed spaces, 

 massiveness being of the essence of both. 



Those busy sprites that aloft fashion the fine 

 filigree of the snowflake have been here also for a 

 week past in the still, white fog myriad artificers 

 perched about on every jutting spine, skirting 

 precarious leaf borders, occupying, in short, all those 

 sharp points and edges with which vegetal nature cuts 

 and pierces the surrounding air. And as if to draw 



