of the frost begins to bind it; such snow has every colour of the rainbow in it, and where it is beaten fine it is like a dust of diamonds.  Under a hard grey sky snow appears dead white; but under such a sun as this it glowed and sparkled with all the glories of an ice cave.  And then came the sunset, a sunset to be dreamed of.  Skiddaw was a pyramid of rosy flame; great saffron seas of light lay over the Catbells, the immense shoulders of Borrowdale were purple, and the lake was truly a sea of glass and fire.  Nor was this a singular and unmatched day.  For a whole month the pageant of the snow lasted.  Close to my own door were glories scarcely inferior to those of Borrowdale and Derwentwater.  The glen was rich with all the fantastic arabesque of the frost, the moor was like a frozen sea, and four miles away lay Buttermere, ringing from morn to night with the sound of skates.  There is no greater error than to suppose winter a drear and joyless season in the country.  It has delights of its own unimagined by the townsman, to whom winter means burst pipes and slushy streets, and snow that is soiled even as it falls.  But among mountains winter has its own incomparable glories, and holds a pageant not inferior to summer’s.

But even in days of rain life had its pleasures.  However bad the weather might be there were few days when we could not be abroad for some hours, and none when the mountains had not some peculiar beauty to reveal.  At the end of a day of rain there were often splendid half-hours, just before sunset, when the mountains glowed with richest colour; when through the rift of thinning clouds some vast peak named like a torch, and the mist blew out like purple banners, and the watercourses sparkled like ropes of brilliants hung on the scarred rocks, and the air was fresh and fragrant with all the perfume of health.  Fog we seldom had, and when it came, it rarely lasted beyond midday.  And then there were the warm delights of winter evenings, when the wood fire blazed upon the hearth, and the gale roared against the windows.

I have already remarked that books read in the solitude of the country always make a deeper impression on my mind than books read in the uneasy leisure of towns.  I found this doubly true when I came to live in the country.  I came to my books with a keener and healthier brain.  The great masters of literature resumed their sway over me; Scott, Shakespeare, Cervantes, long-neglected, took powerful hold upon my mind.  It is not to dwellers in the town that great writers ever make their full appeal.  They are too occupied with the trivial dramas of life among a crowd, too disturbed by the eddy and rush of the life around them.  But for the dweller in solitude these great writers erect a theatre, which is the only theatre he knows.  He is able to attend to the drama presented to him, and to be absorbed by it.  He discusses the actors and their doings as though they were real personages.  Effie Deans and Varley,