WINTER 219 



And a warm west wind blows, and thaw sets in 

 After an hour a dripping sound is heard 

 In all the forests, and the soft strewn snow 

 Under the trees is dibbled thick with holes, 

 And from the boughs the snow loads shuffle down, 

 And in fields sloping to the south, dark plots 

 Of grass peep out amid surrounding snow 

 And widen.' 



Thaw and frost we regard as a Box and Cox. A thaw 

 after three white frosts is the commonest of county pro- 

 phecies ; and as often as not it does not wait for the third. 

 The astonishing difference that two hundred or three hundred 

 miles make is only less remarkable in frost than in rainfall. 

 Almost every year the fenmen in the neighbourhood of Ely 

 have a day or two on the ice. In South Wales or Cornwall 

 it is common to find people who have never donned a skate, 

 and the boys all strangers even to the * postman's knock ' on 

 a slide. 



It is in winter more distinctly than in summer we see the 

 width of the differences between one part of England and 

 another. In summer the chief contrast is between east and 

 west. That still holds, but now a greater appears between 

 north and south. Winter is always real winter in Scotland 

 for some part of the season ; and this sense of winter appears 

 in very vivid form in north-country and south-country poets. 

 Tennyson, from his lovely and sheltered home in the Isle of 

 Wight, looking over that wide meadow in which the lifted 

 spears of crowded daffodils began to hail the spring in January, 

 had another view of winter than Robert Burns lurching on to 

 his plough-handles over his barren fields. He knew what 

 winter was even better than the poet of our Lady of the 

 Snows, who makes winter, for all its severity, a merry and 

 active season, as it is in the Russian capital. 



Whichever course winter takes, the northern or the 



