gloomy and penitent tone was traceable to the fact that it was winter
and all the trees were bare. I assured them that I did not resent the
fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before, and
that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of
destiny. But I could not in any way reconcile them to the fact that it
_was_ winter. There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught
the trees in a kind of disgraceful deshabille, and that they ought not
to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered
themselves with leaves. So it is quite clear that, while very few
people appear to know anything of how trees look in winter, the actual
foresters know less than anyone. So far from the line of the tree when
it is bare appearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantly indefinable to
an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette.
The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft
that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was
sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in
comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more
certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure
the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver
sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the
heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure
stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were
breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs.

But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a
vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a
pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor
over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel
surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as
so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they