198 Winter 



but you love them in winter wholly for the beauty of 

 the passing pageant, and in the face of the fierce and 

 bitter cruelty abroad. There is not a bird nor a beast 

 that goes untortured. Mark how the lonely migrant 

 hurries through the keen air with a complaint like the 

 noise of bending ice under the curling-stone ! With 

 what a languid play of his heavy, wide-feathered 

 wings does the rook come home at dusk to his cold 

 perch ! Gallant looks the fox as, just when stars are 

 paling before the faint daylight, he leaps the farm- 

 yard wall ; but not because he is at truce with the 

 kennelled hounds is he so bold : like every other 

 living thing he is gripped by hunger. ' Void venir 

 rhiver tueur de pauvres gens' True in a measure of 

 human life, that verse is absolutely true of life without 

 the pale. 



As if to intensify the horrors of the frost, the artist 

 ceases not from plying brush and chisel. The snow- 

 flakes that hide the last particles of food from the 

 birds and drive the poor hares from open to covert, 

 float gracefully down the ' aer bruno,' till earth lies en- 

 folded in a wrap of peerless down. The hillside, last 

 May a marvel of green and gold, now wears a grey 

 beyond limning ; and not even when the first leaves 

 drooped from the birch, and the chestnut-flowers told 

 their loves to the breeze, did the forest show fairer 

 than now, with his wilderness of brown stems and 

 white bewildering boughs. He is peopled with rovers 

 driven in from the dead, white fields, yet is he a 



