Crossed and re-crossed the winged snow;
And ere the early bed-time came
The white drift piled the window pane.”
In these severe winter snow-storms which our New England poets illustrate so aptly, we become familiar with the snow in all its unsullied purity, and if we are New England born, we never forget the white, frozen charms of those rigid winters, no matter where we stray, or how torrid the sunshine of our abiding place in later years.
Many there are among us who are familiar with and love that winter idyl, the wintry landscape—a blended symphony of colouring; warm russet browns, gray, and rich velvety greens. Against the dense greens of the Hemlock and Spruce, the sturdy mottled Sycamore branches, with their little pendent russet balls clinging tenaciously to their topmost twigs, stand forth in bold relief, while graceful white birches, slender and ghost-like, mingle and blend with the sombre gray trunks of Chestnut and Birch, which toss and sway their denuded branches high in the frosty air.
A cold gray sky—then stealing down appear the first silent fluttering snowflakes, floating gently earthward. A brooding silence settles over all, unbroken save perhaps by a straggling flight of crows winging their way heavily to safe shelter among the distant forest of dark pines. Timidly at first descend the first advance heralds of the great storm, the tiny snowflakes; then suddenly ever faster and faster they assemble, until the dreary, leaden skies and the landscape picture is confused and merged together in a gray curtain; shut out by the wildly eddying, swirling snow.
76. Crystal coated with granular snow
77. Having flower-like petals