40 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



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 to be precipitated 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 assurance 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, recalling the &quot;glorified sugar-candy &quot; of Lamb s 

 first night at the theatre. It has an artificial air, altogether 

 beneath the grand artist of the atmosphere, and besides 

 does too much mischief to the trees for a philodendrist to 

 take unmixed pleasure in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet 

 like Philips, who really loved Nature, and yet liked her to 

 be mighty fine, as Pepys would say, with a heightening of 

 powder and rouge : 



&quot; And yet but lately have I seen e en here 

 The winter in a lovely dress appear. 

 Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow, 

 Or winds begun through hazy skies to blow, 

 At evening a keen eastern breeze arose, 

 And the descending rain unsullied froze. 

 Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew, 

 The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view 

 The face of Nature in a rich disguise, 

 And brightened every object to my eyes ; 

 For every shrub, and every blade of grass, 

 And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass ; 

 In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show, 

 And through the ice the crimson berries glow ; 

 The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield, 

 Seem polished lances in a hostile field ; 



