perfectly glutted and chilled with water; and hence dry autumns are seldom followed by rigorous winters.
January 7th.—Snow driving all the day, which was followed by frost, sleet, and some snow, till the 12th, when a prodigious mass overwhelmed all the works of men, drifting over the tops of the gates, and filling the hollow lanes.
On the 14th the writer was obliged to be much abroad; and thinks he never before or since has encountered such rugged Siberian weather. Many of the narrow roads were now filled above the tops of the hedges, through which the snow was driven into most romantic and grotesque shapes, so striking to the imagination as not to be seen without wonder and pleasure. The poultry dared not to stir out of their roosting places; for cocks and hens are so dazzled and confounded by the glare of snow that they would soon perish without assistance. The hares also lay sullenly in their seats, and would not move till compelled by hunger, being conscious—poor animals—that the drifts and heaps treacherously betray their footsteps, and prove fatal to numbers of them.
From the 14th the snow continued to increase, and began to stop the road waggons, and coaches, which could no longer keep on their regular stages; and especially on the western roads, where the fall appears
to have been deeper than in the south. The company at Bath, that wanted to attend the Queen’s birthday, were strangely incommoded: many carriages of persons who got in their way to town from Bath as far as Marlborough, after strange embarrassments, here met with a ne plus ultra. The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers if they would shovel them a track to London; but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed; and so the 18th passed over, leaving the company in very uncomfortable circumstances at the Castle and other inns.
On the 20th the sun shone out for the first time since the frost began; a circumstance that has been remarked before much in favour of vegetation. All this time the cold was not very intense, for the thermometer stood at 29°, 28°, 25°, and thereabout; but on the 21st it descended to 20°. The birds now began to be in a very pitiable and starving condition. Tamed by the season, sky-larks settled in the streets of towns, because they saw the ground was bare; rooks frequented dunghills close to houses; and crows watched horses as they passed, and greedily devoured what dropped from them. Hares now came into men’s gardens, and, scraping away the snow, devoured such plants as they could find.
On the 22nd the author had occasion to go to
London through a sort of Laplandian scene, very wild and grotesque indeed. But the metropolis itself exhibited a still more singular appearance than the country; for, being bedded deep in snow, the pavement of the streets could not be touched by the wheels or the horse’s feet, so that the carriages ran about without the least noise. Such an exemption from din and clatter was strange, but not pleasant; it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of desolation:—
“—Ipsa silentia terrent.”
On the 27th much snow fell all day, and in the evening the frost became very intense. At South Lambeth, for the four following nights, the thermometer fell to 11°, 7°, 6°, 6°; and at Selborne to 7°, 6°, 10°; and on the 31st January, just before sunrise, with rime on the trees and on the tube of the glass, the quicksilver sank exactly to zero, being 32° below the freezing point; but by eleven in the morning, though in the shade, it sprang up to 16½°,—a most unusual degree of cold this for the south of England! During these four nights the cold was so penetrating that it occasioned ice in warm chambers and under beds; and in the day the wind was so keen that persons of robust constitutions could scarcely endure to face it. The Thames was at once so frozen over,