302 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



from a slight distance, as it comes down through the 

 pasture. But you could not quite capture, even 

 with the utmost technical dexterity, the delicate 

 undulations of its course. Ordinarily I am aware 

 of it as a coolly gurgling little brown stream, splash- 

 ing into white over rocks, lined with grasses, weeds, 

 and monkey-flowers, but in no sense an exponent of 

 pure line. What line it has is half lost in the grasses. 

 But now it is pure line, a ribbon of velvety black 

 sunk in the deeper white velvet of the snow, a line 

 that tells of every hidden contour of the ground, 

 and, above all, has that sheer beauty of curve which 

 only something that flows can ever completely 

 attain. Coming nearer to it, I find its transformed 

 banks no less strange and lovely. Every rock 

 around which the dark water curves, every grass 

 hassock, is capped with snow like a tiny dome, and 

 all the banks are overhung with snow in a delicate 

 yet abrupt down-sweeping curve, steeper than that 

 of a thatched roof, and almost infinitely varied as 

 the wind above or water below has molded them. 

 It is not until I stand directly over the brook that 

 I see through the black water, swaying gently in 

 the current, the familiar green of living vegetation. 

 My brook in the snow is the skeleton of contour, 

 the soul of pure line. It is a single, fluid master- 

 stroke by the Master Etcher. 



But, as I move about over the wide white paper 

 of the fields and pastures to-day, I realize my entire 

 world as an etching. My pasture climbs steeply to 

 the forest, and the forest, with ever-increasing 

 abruptness, climbs to the fifteen-hundred-foot ridge 

 of the mountain shoulder which juts boldly into the 



