A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



If ever you would know with a finer sense than 

 Cowper possessed, what a wealth of crystal delights 

 is in a winter s walk, you must project a hand 

 some girl ahead of you, just out of sight. Then 

 only will your imaginings feel the real spur of 

 poetry, without, perhaps, as in my case, the power 

 of utterance. You come then to the edge of a 

 great soft mystery, as if the amorous emotions 

 and the physical world somewhere had a common 

 starting-point in the serene conception of beauty. 

 I never knew before how beautiful the dead tree 

 trunks were. They shone with new colours; de 

 licious sombres of Vandyke, and soft, dull terra 

 cottas, and deep sage greens, with splashes of 

 bronze where the light burnished the boles. The 

 vistas shifted and arranged themselves in colon 

 nades and spectral avenues, through which the 

 bacchante lights danced, and along which the 

 stately cedars and hemlocks, tonsured by the snow, 

 stood in priestly gravity, chanting a new gloria. 

 Back of all this paganism of the mind there was 

 a softer association, somehow emitting a deeper 

 muffled tone of expectation, as if the minster bells 

 of Christmas were already rung by the wind, and 

 were reverberating through these cathedral aisles. 



Griselle was looking for trailing juniper. What 

 trailing juniper was, I did not know. It was prob 

 ably a new order of the conifera belonging to the 

 fairy domain into which Griselle slipped so easily. 

 But the kalmia I knew. It stuck its green leaves 

 out of the snow patches unblemished and un 

 daunted. I think we called it mountain laurel 



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