ng aloof and cheerless about them at
our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces
into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we
first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the
human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after
awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware
that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant
and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor
ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the
music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy.

Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to
itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty
of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort.
To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs
with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur
of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we
can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to
go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination,
else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its
ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a
sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we
were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed,
the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs,
snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said
that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and
the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards,
however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us,
among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as
pleasantly heightening the rest.

Far from the world's being dead, as it had seemed indoors, we are
presently, in some strange indefinable way, made intensely conscious of
a curious overwhelming sense of life in the air, as though the crystal
atmosphere was, so to say, ecstatically charged with the invisible
energy of spiritual forces. In the enchanted stillness of the snow, we
seem to hear the very breathing of the spirit of life. The cessation of
all the myriad little sounds that rise so merrily and so musically from
the summer surface of the