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 earth seems to allow us to hear the solemn
beat of the very heart of earth itself. We seem very near to the sacred
mystery of being, nearer than at any other season of the year, for in
other seasons we are distracted by its pleasurable phenomena, but in
winter we seem close to the very mystery itself; for the world seems to
have put on robes of pure spirit and ascended into a diviner ether.