expression is underscored. Summer has few finer
pictures than this winter one of the farmer foddering his cattle
from a stack upon the clean snow,--the movement, the sharply defined
figures, the great green flakes of hay, the long file of patient
cows, the advance just arriving and pressing eagerly for the
choicest morsels, and the bounty and providence it suggests. Or the
chopper in the woods,--the prostrate tree, the white new chips
scattered about, his easy triumph over the cold, his coat hanging to
a limb, and the clear, sharp ring of his axe. The woods are rigid
and tense, keyed up by the frost, and resound like a stringed
instrument. Or the road-breakers, sallying forth with oxen and sleds
in the still, white world, the day after the storm, to restore the
lost track and demolish the beleaguering drifts.

All sounds are sharper in winter; the air transmits better. At night
I hear more distinctly the steady roar of the North Mountain. In
summer it is a sort of complacent purr, as the breezes stroke down
its sides; but in winter always the same low, sullen growl.

A severe artist! No longer the canvas and the pigments, but the
marble and the chisel. When the nights are calm and the moon full, I
go out to gaze upon the wonderful purity of the moonlight and the
snow. The air is full of latent fire, and the cold warms me--after a
different fashion from that of the kitchen stove. The world lies
about me in a "trance of snow." The clouds are pearly and
iridescent, and seem the farthest possible remove from the
condition of a storm,--the ghosts of clouds, the indwelling beauty
freed from all dross. I see the hills, bulging with great drifts,
lift themselves up cold and white against the sky, the black lines
of fences here and there obliterated by the depth of the snow.
Presently a fox barks away up next the mountain, and I imagine I can
almost see him sitting there, in his furs, upon the illuminated
surface, and looking down in my direction. As I listen, one answers
him from behind the woods in the valley. What a wild winter sound,
wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills! Since the wolf has
ceased to howl upon these mountains, and the panther to scream,
there is nothing to be compared with it. So wild! I get up in the
middle of the night to hear it. It is refreshing to the ear, and one
delights to know that such wild creatures are among us. At this
season Nature makes the most of every throb of life that can
withsta