Each flitting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost, Had been mimicked in fairy masonry
By the elfin builders of the frost.
Within the hall are song and laughter,
The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly, And sprouting is every corbel and rafter
With the lightsome green of ivy and holly; Through the deep gulf of the chimney wide Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide; The broad flame-pennons droop and flap
And belly and tug as a flag in the wind; Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap,
Hunted to death in its galleries blind; And swift little troops of silent sparks,
Now pausing, now scattering away as in fear, Go threading the soot-forest's tangled darks Like herds of startled deer.
Through the hushed air the whitening shower
At first thin wavering; till at last the flakes
Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day
With a continual flow. The cherished fields
Put on their winter robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow
melts
Along the mazy current. Low the woods
Bow their hoar head; and, ere the languid sun
Faint from the west emits his evening ray,
Earth's universal face, deep hid and chill,
Is one wide dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man. Drooping, the laborer-ox
Stands covered o'er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven,
Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around
The winnowing store, and claim the little boon
Which Providence assigns them. One alone,
The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,
In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half afraid, he first
Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,
And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is:
Till, more familiar grown, the table-crumbs
Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,
Though timorous of heart, and hard beset
By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs,
And more unpitying man, the garden seeks,
Urged on by fearless want. The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening
earth,
With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispersed,
Dig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.
WHEN ICICLES HANG BY THE WALL.
FROM "LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST."
WHEN icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To-who;
To-whit, to-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
ANNOUNCED by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow; and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight; the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north-wind's masonry!
Out of an unseen quarry, evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake or tree or door;
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage; naught cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Mauger the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And some, as on tender wings they glide
From their chilly birth-cloud, dim and gray,
Are joined in their fall, and, side by side,
Come clinging along their unsteady way;
As friend with friend, or husband with wife,
Makes hand in hand the passage of life;
Each mated flake
Soon sinks in the dark and silent lake.
Lo! while we are gazing, in swifter haste
Stream down the snows, till the air is white,
As, myriads by myriads madly chased,
They fling themselves from their shadowy
The fair, frail creatures of middle sky,
What speed they make, with their grave so nigh ;
Flake after flake
To lie in the dark and silent lake!
I see in thy gentle eyes a tear;
They turn to me in sorrowful thought;
And when his hours are numbered, and the world Thou thinkest of friends, the good and dear,
Is all his own, retiring as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
THE SNOW-SHOWER.
STAND here by my side and turn, I pray,
On the lake below thy gentle eyes;
The clouds hang over it, heavy and gray,
And dark and silent the water lies;
And out of that frozen mist the snow
In wavering flakes begins to flow;
Flake after flake
They sink in the dark and silent lake.
See how in a living swarm they come
From the chambers beyond that misty veil;
Some hover awhile in air, and some
Rush prone from the sky like summer hail.
All, dropping swiftly or settling slow,
Meet, and are still in the depths below;
Flake after flake
Dissolved in the dark and silent lake.
Who were for a time, and now are not;
Like these fair children of cloud and frost,
That glisten a moment and then are lost,
Flake after flake,
All lost in the dark and silent lake.
Yet look again, for the clouds divide;
A gleam of blue on the water lies;
And far away, on the mountain-side,
"Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends At first thin wavering: till at last the flakes Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day With a continual flow,"
Her limbs were chilled, her strength was gone. Then crouching low, from the cutting sleet,
"O God!" she cried in accents wild,
"If I must perish, save my child!"
She stripped her mantle from her breast,
And bared her bosom to the storm,
And round the child she wrapped the vest,
And smiled to think her babe was warm.
With one cold kiss, one tear she shed,
And sunk upon her snowy bed.
His nose is pressed on his quivering feet, Pray, what does the dog do there?
A farmer came from the village plain,
But he lost the traveled way;
And for hours he trod with might and main
A path for his horse and sleigh;
But colder still the cold winds blew,
And deeper still the deep drifts grew,
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