THE POETRY OF FLOWERS. 
SI 
Foi Winter came: the wind was his whip 
One choppy finger was on his lip: 
He had torn the cataracts from the hills, 
And they clank’d at his girdle like manacles • 
His breath was a chain which, without a sound, 
The earth, and the air, and the water bound; 
He came, fiercely driven in his chariot throne 
By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone. 
Then the weeds which were form? of living death ( 
Fled from the frosts to the earth beneath: 
Their decay and sudden flight from frost, 
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost! 
And under the roots of the sensitive plant 
The moles and the dormice died for want; 
And the birds dropp’d stiff from the frozen air, 
And were caught in the branches naked and bare. 
First there came down a thawing rain, 
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again, 
Then there steam’d up a freezing dew 
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew; 
And a northern whirlwind, wandering about 
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, 
Shook the boughs thus laden and heavy and stiff 
And snapp’d them off with his rigid griff. 
