I, singularly moved
To love the lovely that are not beloved,
Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace
The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face.
It is not death, but plenitude of peace;
And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold
Hath less the characters of dark and cold
Than light and warmth asleep,
And intermittent breathing still doth keep
With the infant harvest heaving soft below
Its eider coverlet of snow.

The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of
literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost
moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The
loftiest masterpieces have something 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