A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 37 



faint blue of the hollows, for the shadows in snow are always i 

 blue, and the tender rose of higher points, as you stand with j 

 your back to the setting sun and look upward across the soft i 

 rondure of a hillside. I have seen within a mile of home 

 effects of colour as lovely as any iridescence of the Silberhorn 

 after sundown. Charles II., who never said a foolish thing, 

 gave the English climate the highest praise when he said 

 that it allowed you more hours out of doors than any other, 

 and I think our winter may fairly make the same boast as 

 compared with the rest of the year. Its still mornings, with 

 the thermometer near zero, put a premium on walking. There 

 is more sentiment in turf, perhaps, and it is more elastic to 

 the foot ; its silence, too, is wellnigh as congenial with medi 

 tation as that of fallen pine-tassel; but for exhilaration there 

 is nothing like a stiff snow-crust that creaks like a cricket at 

 every step, and communicates its own sparkle to the senses. 

 The air you drink is frappe, all its grosser particles preci 

 pitated, and the dregs of your blood with them. A purer 

 current mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, 

 and rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. There is no 

 thing left to breed an exhalation of ill-humour or despondency. 

 They say that this rarefied atmosphere has lessened the 

 capacity of our lungs. Be it so. Quart-pots are for muddier 

 liquor than nectar. To me, the city in winter is infinitely 

 dreary the sharp street-corners have such a chill in them, 

 and the snow so soon loses it maidenhood to become a mere 

 drab doing shameful things, as Steele says of politicians, ; 

 * without being ashamed. I pine for the Quaker purity of 

 my country landscape. I am speaking, of course, of those 

 winters that are not niggardly of snow, as ours too often are, 

 giving us a gravelly dust instead. Nothing can be unsight- 

 lier than those piebald fields where the coarse brown hide of 

 Earth shows through the holes of her ragged ermine. But 

 even when there is abundance of snow, I find as I grow 

 older that there are not so many good crusts as there used 

 to be. When I first observed this, I rashly set it to the ac 

 count of that general degeneracy in nature (keeping pace 

 with the same melancholy phenomenon in man) which forces 

 itself upon the attention and into the philosophy of middle 

 life. But happening once to be weighed, it occurred to me 

 that an arch which would bear fifty pounds could hardly be 

 blamed for giving way under more than three times the 



