42 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



It is 



" The fanned snow 



That 's bolted by the northern blasts twice o'er," 

 Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi, 

 Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds, 



packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear 

 your weight. What grace is in all the curves, as if 

 every one of them had been swept by that inspired 

 thumb of Phidias's journeyman ! 



Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those 

 light ripples that sometimes scurry across smooth water 

 with a sudden blur. But on this gleaming hush the 

 aerial deluge has left plain marks of its course ; and 

 in gullies through which it rushed torrent-like, the eye 

 finds its bed irregularly scooped like that of a brook in 

 hard beach-sand, or, in more sheltered spots, traced with 

 outlines like those left by the sliding edges of the surf 

 upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an infinitely 

 thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we shall have 

 to drink when the state does her whole duty as a moral 

 reformer. Nor is the wind the only thing whose trail 

 you will notice on this sensitive surface. You will find 

 that you have more neighbors and night visitors than 

 you dreamed of. Here is the dainty footprint of a cat ; 

 here a dog has looked in on you like an amateur watch- 

 man to see if all is right, slumping clumsily about in the 

 mealy treachery. And look ! before you were up in the 

 morning, though you were a punctual courtier at the 

 sun's levee, here has been a squirrel zigzagging to and 

 fro like a hound gathering the scent, and some tiny bird 

 searching for unimaginable food, perhaps for the tinier 

 creature, whatever it is, that drew this slender continu- 

 ous trail like those made on the wet beach by light 

 borderers of the sea. The earliest autographs were as 

 frail as these. Poseidon traced his lines, or giant birds 

 made their mark, on preadamite sea-margins; and the 



