WINTER MARVELS 13 



feet 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 gen- 

 erated ! 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 snow- 

 flake escapes its fashioning hand. Nothing is 

 cheap and coarse, neither dewdrops nor snow- 

 flakes. 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 

 snowflakes, but that, when I observe these crystal 

 stars falling around me, they are only just gen- 

 erated 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, comparatively, 

 without order or beauty, far down in their fall, 

 like men in their advanced age. As for the cir- 

 cumstances 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 hori- 

 zontally 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. 



