40 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



Ovid heightens the picture by a single touch : 



Ipse genu posito flammas exsuscitat aura. 

 Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames. 



If you walk down now into the woods, you may find a 

 robin or a blue-bird among the red-cedars, or a nuthatch 

 scaling deviously the trunk of some hardwood tree with an 

 eye as keen as that of a French soldier foraging for the fiot- 

 aii-feu of his mess. Perhaps a blue-jay shrills cah cah in his 

 corvine trebles, or a chickadee 



Shows feats of his gymnastic play, 

 Head downward, clinging to the spray. 



But both him and the snow-bird I love better to see, tiny 

 fluffs of feathered life, as they scurry about in a driving mist 

 of snow, than in this serene air. 



Coleridge has put into verse one of the most beautiful 

 phenomena of a winter walk : 



The woodman winding westward up the glen 

 At wintry dawn, where o er the sheep-track s maze 

 The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, 

 Sees full before him, gliding without tread, 

 An image with a halo round its head. 



But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. I have noticed it 

 often in a summer morning, when the grass was heavy with 

 dew, and even later in the day, when the dewless grass was 

 still fresh enough to have a gleam of its own. 



For my own part I prefer a winter walk that takes in the 

 nightfall and the intense silence that erelong follows it. The 

 evening lamps look yellower by contrast with the snow, and 

 give the windows that hearty look of which our secretive 

 fires have almost robbed them. The stars seem 



To hang, like twinkling winter lamps, 

 Among the branches of the leafless trees, 



or, if you are on a hill-top (whence it is sweet to watch the 

 home-lights gleam out one by one), they look nearer than in 

 summer, and appear to take a conscious part in the cold. 

 Especially in one of those stand-stills of the air that forebode 

 a change of weather, the sky is dusted with motes of fire of 

 which the summer- watcher never dreamed. Winter, too, is, 

 on the whole, the triumphant season of the moon, a moon 

 devoid of sentiment, if you choose, but with the refreshment 

 of a purer intellectual light the cooler orb of middle life. 

 Who ever saw anything to match that gleam, rather divined 

 than seen, which runs before her over the snow, a breath of 



