44 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



knack at draping the trees ; and about eaves or stone 

 walls, wherever, indeed, the evaporation is rapid, and it 

 finds a chance to cling, it will build itself out in curves 

 of wonderful beauty. I have seen one of these dumb 

 waves, thus caught in the act of breaking, curl four feet 

 beyond the edge of my roof and hang there for days, as 

 if Nature were too well pleased with her work to let it 

 crumble from its exquisite pause. After such a storm, 

 if you are lucky enough to have even a sluggish ditch 

 for a neighbor, be sure to pay it a visit. You will find 

 its banks corniced with what seems 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 unintel 

 ligible. 



A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our 

 freakish climate, the wind will whisk sometimes into the 

 northwest so suddenly as to plate all the trees with crys 

 tal 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 " glorified 

 sugar-candy " 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 : 



" And yet but lately have I seen e'en here 

 The winter in a lovely dress appear. 



