1 6 Winter Marvels [SECOND WEEK 



They are about one tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect 

 little wheels with six spokes, without a tire, or rather 

 with six perfect little leaflets, fern-like, with a distinct, 

 straight, slender midrib raying from the centre. On each 

 side of each midrib there is a transparent, thin blade 

 with a crenate edge. How full of the creative genius is 

 the air in which these are generated! I should hardly 

 admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. 

 Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a 

 snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. Nothing is cheap 

 and coarse, neither dewdrops nor snowflakes. Soon the 

 storm increases (it was already very severe to face), and 

 the snow becomes finer, more white and powdery. 



" Who knows but this is the original form of all snow- 

 flakes, but that, when I observe these crystal stars falling 

 around me, they are only just generated in the low mist 

 next the earth. I am nearer to the source of the snow, 

 its primal auroral, and golden hour of infancy; commonly 

 the flakes reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, com- 

 paratively, without order or beauty, far down in their 

 fall, like men in their advanced age. As for the circum- 

 stances under which this occurs, it is quite cold, and the 

 driving storm is bitter to face, though very little snow is 

 falling. It comes almost horizontally from the north. . . . 

 A divinity must have stirred within them, before the 

 crystals did thus shoot and set: wheels of the storm 

 chariots. The same law that shapes the earth and the 

 stars shapes the snowflake. Call it rather snow star. 

 As surely as the petals of a flower are numbered, each of 

 these countless snow stars comes whirling to earth, pro- 



