Snow-drift, snow-storm, snow-fog may paralyse communications and bring deep anxiety or irremediable grief to an incalculable number. Yet, we must admit that even our severest winter is but a fierce reminder of times long past for us, the times of the mail-coach, the rude cart, the mountain-pony, that the worst we ever have is tolerable beside the bleak wretchedness of Pomerania, the frightful cold of Esthonia, the death-in-life of Muscovy--to say nothing of lands still more wild and remote. One cannot say, here is snow at its loveliest, here is ice in a unique beauty. Frozen lochs by moonlight, frozen fens under the pale azure of cloudless noons, dark winding rivers, lifeless seemingly in the grip of frost, traversed by starshine under overhanging boughs, lagoons where the dark-blue or steel-blue ice mirrors the drifting cloud or the flying skater, village-ponds, canals, the water-ways of towns and cities, in all, in each, the radiant miracle is evident. Like moonshine, this beauty of ice or snow may be omnipresent. If it inhabits the wilderness, it is fulfilled also in the streets of cities. Who has not looked out on the sordid thoroughfares of a town, and seen the poor ignoble disarray of chimney-tops and slated roofs and crude angles and ornamentations take on a new and entrancing aspect, so that even the untidy shops and tawdry dwellings assume a crown of loveliness, and the long, dull, perspectives of monotonous roads might be the trampled avenues about the gates of fairyland? The most sordid hamlet in the dreariest manufacturing-region may, suddenly, awake to a dawn so wonderful in what it reveals that the villagers might well believe, as in the old folk-tale, that Christ had passed that way in the night and left the world white and husht, stainlessly pure. But, of course, we have each of us our preferences. Some love best to see the long swelling reaches of ploughed lands covered with new fallen snow not too heavy to hide the wave-like procession of the hidden furrows. Some love best to look on wide interminable wolds, a solitude of unbroken whiteness, without even the shadow of a cloud or the half-light of a grey sky: some, upon familiar pastures now changed as though in the night the fields had receded into the earth and the fields of another world had silently sunk into their place: some, upon mountain-slopes, on whose vast walls the shadows of wheeling hawks and curlews pass like pale blue scimetars: some, on woodlands, where from the topmost elm-bough to the lowest fir-plume or outspread bough of cedar the immaculate soft burthens miraculously suspend. For myself--after the supreme loveliness of snowy mountain-ranges at dawn or sunset or moon-glow--I am most entranced by snow in a pine-forest. The more so if, as in one my mind recreates for me as I write, there are glades where I can come to a rock whence an over-leaning white hill may be seen as though falling out of heaven, with white mountains