sunlight, the world--houses and trees, ponds and rivers--was like a
creation, more than blocked out, but far from finished--in marble.

"And this," I said to myself, as I regarded the wondrous loveliness with
which the snow had at once clothed and disfigured the bare branches of the
trees, "this is what has come of the chaos of falling flakes! To this
repose of beauty has that storm settled and sunk! Will it not be so with
our mental storms as well?"

But here the figure displeased me; for those were not the true right
shapes of the things; and the truth does not stick to things, but shows
itself out of them.

"This lovely show," I said, "is the result of a busy fancy. This white
world is the creation of a poet such as Shelley, in whom the fancy was too
much for the intellect. Fancy settles upon anything; half destroys its
form, half beautifies it with something that is not its own. But the true
creative imagination, the form-seer, and the form-bestower, falls like the
rain in the spring night, vanishing amid the roots of the trees; not
settling upon them in clouds of wintry white, but breaking forth from them
in clouds of summer green."

And then my thoughts very naturally went from Nature to my niece; and I
asked myself whether within the last few days I had not seen upon her
countenance the expression of a mental spring-time. For the mind has its
seasons four, with many changes, as well as the world, only that the
cycles are generally longer: they can hardly be more mingled than as here
in our climate.

Let me confess, now that the subject of the confession no longer exists,