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MIDWINTER.

  The speckled sky is dim with snow,
  The light flakes falter and fall slow;
  Athwart the hill-top, rapt and pale,
  Silently drops a silvery veil;
  The far-off mountain’s misty form
  Is entering now a tent of storm;
  And all the valley is shut in
  By flickering curtains gray and thin.

  But cheerily the chickadee
  Singeth to me on fence and tree;
  The snow sails round him, as he sings,
  White as the down of angels’ wings.

  I watch the slow flakes, as they fall
  On bank and brier and broken wall;
  Over the orchard, waste and brown,
  All noiselessly they settle down,
  Tipping the apple-boughs, and each
  Light quivering twig of plum and peach.

  On turf and curb and bower-roof
  The snow-storm spreads its ivory woof;
  It paves with pearl the garden-walk;
  And lovingly round tattered stalk
  And shivering stem its magic weaves
  A mantle fair as lily-leaves.

  The hooded beehive, small and low,
  Stands like a maiden in the snow;
  And the old door-slab is half hid
  Under an alabaster lid.

  All day it snows:  the sheeted post
  Gleams in the dimness like a ghost;
  All day the blasted oak has stood
  A muffled wizard of the wood;
  Garland and airy cap adorn
  The sumach and the way-side thorn,
  And clustering spangles lodge and shine
  In the dark tresses of the pine.

  The ragged bramble, dwarfed and old,
  Shrinks like a beggar in the cold;
  In surplice white the cedar stands,
  And blesses him with priestly hands.

  Still cheerily the chickadee
  Singeth to me on fence and tree: 
  But in my inmost ear is heard
  The music of a holier bird;
  And heavenly thoughts, as soft and white
  As snow-flakes, on my soul alight,
  Clothing with love my lonely heart,
  Healing with peace each bruised part,
  Till all my being seems to be
  Transfigured by their purity.

* * * * *

EASE IN WORK.

To thoughts and expressions of peculiar force and beauty we give the epithets “happy” and “felicitous,” as if we esteemed them a product rather of the writer’s fortune than of his toil.  Thus, Dryden says of Shakspeare, “All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew from them, not laboriously, but luckily.”  And, indeed, when one contemplates a noble creation in art or literature, one seems to receive from the work itself a certain testimony that it was never wrought out with wrestling struggle, but was genially and joyfully produced, as the sun sends forth his beams and the earth her herbage.  This appearance of play and ease is sometimes so notable as to cause a curious misapprehension.  For example, De Quincey permits himself, if my memory serve me, to say that Plato probably wrote his works not in any seriousness of spirit, but only as a pastime!  A pastime for the immortals that were.