34 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



rock of merest beach-sand, whose feeble hold on memory 

 shall be washed away by the next wave of fickle opinion ! 

 Well, well, honest Jacques, there are better things to be 

 found in the snow than sermons. 



The snow that falls damp comes commonly in larger flakes 

 from windless skies, and is the prettiest of all to watch from 

 under cover. This is the kind Homer had in mind ; and 

 Dante, who had never read him, compares the dilatate falde t 

 the flaring flakes, of his fiery rain, to those of snow among 

 the mountains without wind. This sort of snowfall has no 

 fight in it, and does not challenge you to a wrestle like that 

 which drives well from the northward, with all moisture 

 thoroughly winnowed out of it by the frosty wind. Burns, 

 who was more out of doors than most poets, and whose bare 

 foot Muse got the colour in her cheeks by vigorous exercise 

 in all weathers, was thinking of this drier deluge when he 

 speaks of the whirling drift/ and tells how 



Chanticleer 

 Shook off the powthery snaw. 



But the damper and more deliberate falls have a choice 

 knack at draping the trees; and about eaves or stone walls 

 wherever, indeed, the evaporation is rapid, and it finds a 

 chance to cling it will build itself out in curves of wonderful 

 beauty. I have seen one of these dumb waves, thus caught 

 in the act of breaking, curl four feet beyond the edge of my 

 roof and hang there for days, as if Nature were too well 

 pleased with her work to let it crumble from its exquisite 

 pause. After such a storm, if you are lucky enough to have 

 even a sluggish ditch for a neighbour, be sure to pay it a 

 visit. You will find its banks corniced with what seems pre 

 cipitated light, and the dark current down below gleams as if 

 with an inward lustre. Dull of motion as it is, you never 

 saw water that seemed alive before. It has a brightness like 

 that of the eyes of some smaller animals, which gives assu 

 rance of life, but of a life foreign and unintelligible. 



A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our freakish 

 climate, the wind will whisk sometimes into the north-west 

 so suddenly as to plate all the trees with crystal before it has 

 swept the sky clear of its last cobweb of cloud. Ambrose 

 Philips, in a poetical epistle from Copenhagen to the Earl of 

 Dorset, describes this strange confectionery of Nature, for 

 such, I am half ashamed to say, it always seems to me, 



