significance. Every 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