A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 37 



&quot; Lorsque la froidure inhumaine 

 De leur verd orneraent depouille les forets 

 Sous une neige epaisse il couvre les guerets, 

 Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la lame.&quot; 



In this, as in Pope s version of the passage in Homer, there 

 is, at least, a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in the blind 

 ing drift of words. But, on the whole, if one would know 

 what snow is, I should advise him not to hunt up what the 

 poets have said about it, but to look at the sweet miracle 

 itself. 



The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as those of 

 Spring. In a grey December day, when, as the farmers 

 say, it is too cold to snow, his numbed fingers will let fall 

 doubtfully a few star-shaped flakes, the snowdrops and 

 anemones that harbinger his more assured reign. Now, 

 and now only, may be seen, heaped on the horizon s eastern 

 edge, those &quot; blue clouds &quot; from forth which Shakespeare 

 says that Mars &quot; doth pluck the masoned turrets.&quot; Some 

 times also, when the sun is low, you will see a single cloud 

 trailing a flurry of snow along the southern hills in a 

 wavering fringe of purple. And when at last the real 

 snow-storm comes, it leaves the earth with a virginal look 

 on it that no other of the seasons can rival, compared with 

 which, indeed, they seem soiled and vulgar. 



And what is there in nature so beautiful as the next 

 morning after such confusion of the elements 1 Night has 

 no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries of noise 

 are spiked. We see the movement of life as a deaf man 

 sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous existence that 

 inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is bare. The. 

 earth is clothed in innocence as a garment. Every wound 

 of the landscape is healed ; whatever was stiff has been 

 sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphrodite ; what was 

 unsightly has been covered gently with a soft splendour, as 

 if, Cowley would have said, Nature had cleverly lot fall her 

 handkerchief to hide it. If the virgin (Notre Dame de la 

 neige) were to come back, here is an earth that would not 

 bruise her foot nor stain it. It is 



