, many years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj's
place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm
in the achievements of Nature; that the Taj represented man's supremest
possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and
splendor, just as the ice-storm represents Nature's supremest possibility
in the combination of those same qualities. I do not know how long ago
that idea was bred in me, but I know that I cannot remember back to a
time when the thought of either of these symbols of gracious and
unapproachable perfection did not at once suggest the other. If I
thought of the ice-storm, the Taj rose before me divinely beautiful; if I
thought of the Taj, with its encrustings and inlayings of jewels, the
vision of the ice-storm rose. And so, to me, all these years, the Taj
has had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even
remotely approached it it was man's architectural ice-storm.

Here in London the other night I was talking with some Scotch and English
friends, and I mentioned the ice-storm, using it as a figure--a figure
which failed, for none of them had heard of the ice-storm. One
gentleman, who was very familiar with American literature, said he had
never seen it mentioned in any book. That is strange. And I, myself,
was not able to say that I had seen it mentioned in a book; and yet the
autumn foliage, with all other American scenery, has received full and
competent attention.

The oversight is strange, for in America the ice-storm is an event. And
it is not an event which one is careless about. When it comes, the news
flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors,
and shoutings, "The ice-storm! the ice-storm!" and even the laziest
sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows. The
ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought
in the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rain
falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and
as it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig are
incased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree
made all of glass--glass that is crystal-clear. All along the underside
of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles--the frozen drip.
Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are round
beads--frozen tears.

The weather clears, toward dawn, a