26 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



shadowy values. Through this medium the high 

 lights, paradoxically, are the darkest spots, a fore- 

 ground evergreen, perhaps, or the barn across the road. 

 A pasture elm is a fountain of twig tracery, the wall of 

 the mountain a wave of shadow billowing against the 

 white sky. But there is nothing theatrical about the 

 soft gauze of the storm; there is no concentration or 

 colour in the illumination, but a uniform radiation of 

 pure light, as pure as water. 



And now, when you have looked your fill on the soft 

 suffusion of your landscape spaces, you are at length 

 aware of the sound of the storm, a sound as soft as the 

 sight, not a patter nor a hiss, but something between 

 the two as the flakes descend on the dead grass and the 

 foliage, seeming to accelerate in pace when they near the 

 earth, as if eager for their lodging place. This delicate 

 sound, of course, is more apparent in the woods, or in 

 fields where the dried weeds stand up stiffly, and I have 

 walked many a mile in Winter listening to it in the dead 

 foliage above my head, while each new vista showed a 

 white world and under foot the snow was deepening. 



Is the world ever more lovely than on the first morn- 

 ing after the first storm? From the Oh's ! and Ah's ! and 

 How Lovely's ! of the average inexpressive mortal, to the 

 poetry of Whittier or the canvases of innumerable 

 artists, the record runs of our delight in the "frolic 

 architecture" of the snow. I sometimes wonder, as 

 they spindle skyward, why Norway spruces were 



