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A WINTER SCENE FROM LEE'S CLIFF 



December 7, 1856. Take my first skate to Fair 

 Haven Pond. . . . That grand old poem called Win- 

 ter is round again without any connivance of mine. 

 As I sit under Lee's Cliff, where the snow is melted, 

 amid sere pennyroyal and frost-bitten catnep, I look 

 over my shoulder upon an arctic scene. I see with 

 surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice 

 speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, 

 where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth reflect- 

 ing water. I hear, too, the familiar belching voice of 

 the pond. It seemed as if winter had come without 

 any interval since midsummer, and I was prepared to 

 see it flit away by the time I again looked over my 

 shoulder. It was as if I had dreamed it. But I see 

 that the farmers have had time to gather their har- 

 vests as usual, and the seasons have revolved as 

 slowly as in the first autumn of my life. The winters 

 come now as fast as snowflakes. It is wonderful 

 that old men do not lose their reckoning. It was 

 summer, and now again it is winter. Nature loves 

 this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeat- 

 ing it. So sweet and wholesome is the winter, so 

 simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, 

 that her children will never weary of it. What a 

 poem ! an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million 

 tinkling rhymes. It is solid beauty. It has been sub- 

 jected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the 



