A RIVER VIEW. ^^^LJ 207 



If the opening of the river is gentle, the closing of 

 it is sometimes attended by scenes exactly the re- 

 verse. 



I A cold wave one December was accompanied by a 

 violent wind, which blew for two days and two nights. 

 The ice formed rapidly in the river, but the wind and 

 waves kept it from uniting and massing. On the sec- 

 ond day the scene was indescribably wild and forbid- 

 ding; the frost and fury of December were never 

 more vividly pictured : vast crumpled, spumy ice-fields 

 interspersed with stretches of wildly agitated water, 

 the heaving waves thick with forming crystals, the 

 shores piled with frozen foam and pulverized floes. 

 After the cold wave had spent itself and the masses 

 had become united and stationary, the scene was 

 scarcely less wild. I fancied the plain looked more 

 like a field of lava and scoria than like a field of ice, 

 an eruption from some huge frost volcano of the 

 north. Or did it suggest that a battle had been 

 fought there, and that this wild confusion was the 

 ruin wrought by the contending forces ? 



No sooner has the river pulled his icy coverlid over 

 him than he begins to snore in his winter sleep. It is 

 a singular sound. Thoreau calls it a " whoop," Em- 

 erson a " cannonade," and in " Merlin " speaks of 



" The gasp and moan 

 Of the ice-imprisoned flood." 



Sometimes it is a well-defined grunt e-h-h, e-h-h, as 

 if some ice-god turned uneasily in his bed. 



One fancies tfce sound is like this, when he hears it 



