WINTIiY OUTLOOKS. 7 



almost as black a picture as that drawn by 

 Thomson in the lines already quoted from his 

 'Winter.' It is in his 'Inebriety' that Crabbe's 

 lines occur, in which he gives the following 

 terrible view, and the verse succeeds the one 

 just given : 



' From snow-topp'd hills the whirlwinds keenly blow, 

 Howl through the woods and pierce the vale below, 

 Through the sharp air a flaky torrent flies, 

 Mocks the slow sight and hides the gloomy skies.' 



Ably descriptive as are all these verses of the 

 harsher aspects of Winter, they seem to the 

 present writer to err only in so far as they give 

 a general character to particular features ; but 

 this error is widely made by poets who con- 

 ceive that Winter is all black and dismal, that 

 it has no brighter side, and that if there be 

 brighter intervals they are ' unseasonable.' The 

 popular though erroneous notion of a forest is 

 that of land covered uninterruptedly with trees. 

 Forest, in fact, is country of a mixed kind, and 

 may include woods, heaths, moors, mountains, 

 and streams. So Winter is a season of a mixed 

 character, and may include different kinds of 



